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THE  ANTICHRIST 


Mr.  Mencken  has  also  written 

PREJUDICES 
Five  Volumes 
SELECTED  PREJUDICES 
A BOOK  OF  BURLESQUES 
A BOOK  OF  PREFACES 
IN  DEFENSE  OF  WOMEN 
THE  AMERICAN  LANGUAGE 
NOTES  ON  DEMOCRACY 
TREATISE  ON  THE  GODS 

He  has  translated 

THE  ANTICHRIST 

by  F.  W.  Nietzsche 
He  has  edited 

menckeniana:  a schimpflexikon 

He  has  written  introductions  to 

VENTURES  in  COMMON  SENSE 

by  E.  W.  Howe 

MAJOR  CONFLICTS 

by  Stephen  Crane 

THE  AMERICAN  DEMOCRAT 

by  James  Fenimore  Cooper 

THESE  ARE  BORZOI  BOOKS  PUBLISHED 
BY  ALFRED  A.  KNOPF 


THE 

ANTICHRIST 


By  F.  W.  NIETZSCHE 


Translated  ß-om  the  German 
with  an  Introduction  by 

H.  L.  MENCKEN 


ALFREDAKNOPF 


COPYRIGHT  1918  BY  ALFRED  A.  KNOPF,  INC, 
All  rights  reserved 

No  part  of  this  book  may  be  reprinted  in  any  form 
without  permission  in  writing  from  the  publisher 

Published  February,  1920 
Pocket  Book  Edition,  Published  September,  1923 
Reprinted  Twice 
New  edition  September,  1931 


MANUFACTURED  IN 
O F A M 


THE  UNITED  STA 
ERICA 


T E S 


CONTENTS 


Introduction  by  H.  L.  Mencken 
Author’s  Preface 


The  Antichrist 


INTRODUCTION 


Save  for  his  raucous,  rhapsodical  autobiog- 
raphy, “Ecce  Homo,”  “The  Antichrist”  is  the 
last  thing  that  Nietzsche  ever  wrote,  and  so  it 
may  be  accepted  as  a statement  of  some  of  his 
most  salient  ideas  in  their  final  form.  Notes  for 
it  had  been  accumulating  for  years  and  it  was  to 
have  constituted  the  first  volume  of  his  long- 
projected  magnum,  opus,  “The  Will  to  Power.” 
His  full  plan  for  this  work,  as  originally  drawn 
up,  was  as  follows: 

Vol.  I.  The  Antichrist:  an  Attempt  at  a Criticism 
of  Christianity. 

Vol.  II.  The  Free  Spirit:  a Criticism  of  Philosophy 
as  a Nihilistic  Movement. 

Vol.  III.  The  Immoralist:  a Criticism  of  Morality, 
the  Most  Fatal  Form  of  Ignorance. 

Vol.  IV.  Dionysus:  the  Philosophy  of  Eternal  Re- 
currence. 

The  first  sketches  for  “The  Will  to  Power” 
were  made  in  1884,  soon  after  the  publication  of 
the  first  three  parts  of  “Thus  Spake  Zarathustra,” 
— 7 — 

^ 9 O 

— ’ } h.  (V  V' 


INTRODUCTION 


and  thereafter,  for  four  years,  Nietzsche  piled  up 
notes.  They  were  written  at  all  the  places  he 
visited  on  his  endless  travels  in  search  of  health 
— at  Nice,  at  Venice,  at  Sils-Maria  in  the  Enga- 
dine  (for  long  his  favourite  resort),  at  Cannobio, 
at  Zürich,  at  Genoa,  at  Chur,  at  Leipzig.  Sev- 
eral times  his  work  was  interrupted  by  other 
books,  first  by  “Beyond  Good  and  Evil,”  then  by 
“The  Genealogy  of  Morals”  (written  in  twenty 
days),  then  by  his  Wagner  pamphlets.  Almost 
as  often  he  changed  his  plan.  Once  he  decided 
to  expand  “The  Will  to  Power”  to  ten  volumes, 
with  “An  Attempt  at  a New  Interpretation  of 
the  World”  as  a general  sub-title.  Again  he 
adopted  the  sub-title  of  “An  Interpretation  of  All 
That  Happens.”  Finally,  he  hit  upon  “An  At- 
tempt at  a Transvaluation  of  All  Values,”  and 
went  back  to  four  volumes,  though  with  a num- 
ber of  changes  in  their  arrangement.  In  Sep- 
tember, 1888,  he  began  actual  work  upon  the 
first  volume,  and  before  the  end  of  the  month  it 
was  completed.  The  Summer  had  been  one  of 
almost  hysterical  creative  activity.  Since  the 
middle  of  June  he  had  written  two  other  small 
books,  “The  Case  of  Wagner”  and  “The  Twi- 
light of  the  Idols,”  and  before  the  end  of  the 
— 8 — 


INTRODUCTION 


year  he  was  destined  to  write  “Ecce  Homo.” 
Some  time  during  December  his  health  began  to 
fail  rapidly,  and  soon  after  the  New  Year  he  was 
helpless.  Thereafter  he  wrote  no  more. 

The  Wagner  diatribe  and  “The  Twilight  of  the 
Idols”  were  published  immediately,  but  “The 
Antichrist”  did  not  get  into  type  until  1895.  I 
suspect  that  the  delay  was  due  to  the  influence 
of  the  philosopher’s  sister,  Elisabeth  Förster- 
Nietzsche,  an  intelligent  and  ardent  but  by  no 
means  uniformly  judicious  propagandist  of  his 
ideas.  During  his  dark  days  of  neglect  and  mis- 
understanding, when  even  family  and  friends 
kept  aloof,  Frau  Förster-Nietzsche  went  with  him 
farther  than  any  other,  but  there  were  bounds  be- 
yond which  she,  also,  hesitated  to  go,  and  those 
bounds  were  marked  by  crosses.  One  notes,  in 
her  biography  of  him — a useful  but  not  always 
accurate  work — an  evident  desire  to  purge  him 
of  the  accusation  of  mocking  at  sacred  things. 
He  had,  she  says,  great  admiration  for  “the  ele- 
vating effect  of  Christianity  . . . upon  the  weak 
and  ailing,”  and  “a  real  liking  for  sincere,  pious 
Christians,”  and  “a  tender  love  for  the  Founder 
of  Christianity.”  All  his  wrath,  she  continues, 
was  reserved  for  “St.  Paul  and  his  like,”  who 
— 9 — 


INTRODUCTION 


perverted  the  Beatitudes,  which  Christ  intended 
for  the  lowly  only,  into  a universal  religion  which 
made  war  upon  aristocratic  values.  Here,  obvi- 
ously, one  is  addressed  by  an  interpreter  who 
cannot  forget  that  she  is  the  daughter  of  a Lu- 
theran pastor  and  the  grand-daughter  of  two 
others;  a touch  of  conscience  gets  into  her  read- 
ing of  “The  Antichrist.”  She  even  hints  that 
the  text  may  have  been  garbled,  after  the  author’s 
collapse,  by  some  more  sinister  heretic.  There 
is  not  the  slightest  reason  to  believe  that  any  such 
garbling  ever  took  place,  nor  is  there  any  evi- 
dence that  their  common  heritage  of  piety  rested 
upon  the  brother  as  heavily  as  it  rested  upon  the 
sister.  On  the  contrary,  it  must  be  manifest  that 
Nietzsche,  in  this  book,  intended  to  attack  Chris- 
tianity headlong  and  with  all  arms,  that  for  all 
his  rapid  writing  he  put  the  utmost  care  into  it, 
and  that  he  wanted  it  to  be  printed  exactly  as  it 
stands.  The  ideas  in  it  were  anything  but  new 
to  him  when  he  set  them  down.  He  had  been  de- 
veloping them  since  the  days  of  his  beginning. 
You  will  find  some  of  them,  clearly  recognizable, 
in  the  first  book  he  ever  wrote,  “The  Birth  of 
Tragedy.”  [y  ou  will  find  the  most  important  of 
all  of  them — the  conception  of  Christianity  as 
— 10  — 


INTRODUCTION 


ressentiment — set  forth  at  length  in  the  first  part 
of  “The  Genealogy  of  Morals,”  published  under 
his  own  supervision  in  1887.  And  the  rest  are 
scattered  through  the  whole  vast  mass  of  his 
notes,  sometimes  as  mere  questionings  hut 
often  worked  out  very  carefully.  Moreover, 
let  it  not  be  forgotten  that  it  was  Wagner’s  yield- 
ing to  Christian  sentimentality  in  “Parsifal” 
that  transformed  Nietzsche  from  the  first  among 
his  literary  advocates  into  the  most  bitter  of 
his  opponents.  He  could  forgive  every  other 
sort  of  mountebankery,  but  not  that.  f‘In  me,” 
he  once  said,  “the  Christianity  of  my  forbears 
reaches  its  logical  conclusion.  In  me  the  stem 
intellectual  conscience  that  Christianity  fosters 
and  makes  paramount  turns  against  Christian- 
ity. In  me  Christianity  . . . devours  itself.”*( 
In  truth,  the  present  philippic  is  as  necessary 
to  the  completeness  of  the  whole  of  Nietzsche’s 
system  as  the  keystone  is  to  the  arch.  All  the 
curves  of  his  speculation  lead  up  to  it.  What  he 
flung  himself  against,  from  beginning  to  end  of 
his  days  of  writing,  was  always,  in  the  last  an- 
alysis, Christianity  in  some  form  or  other^ — 
Christianity  as  a system  of  practical  ethics,  Chris- 
tianity as  a political  code,  Christianity  as  meta- 
— 11— 


INTRODUCTION 


physics,  Christianity  as  a gauge  of  the  truth.  It 
would  be  difficult  to  think  of  any  intellectual  en- 
terprise on  his  long  list  that  did  not,  more  or  less 
directly  and  clearly,  relate  itself  to  this  master 
enterprise  of  them  all.  It  was  as  if  his  apostaey 
from  the  faith  of  his  fathers,  filling  him  with  the 
! fiery  zeal  of  the  convert,  and  particularly  of  the 
convert  to  heresy,  had  blinded  him  to  every  other 
element  in  the  gigantic  self-delusion  of  civilized 
man.  The  will  to  power  was  his  answer  to 
Christianity’s  affectation  of  humility  and  self- 
sacrifice;  eternal  recurrence  was  his  moeking 
criticism  of  Christian  optimism  and  millennial- 
ism;  the  superman  was  his  candidate  for  the 
place  of  the  Christian  ideal  of  the  “good”  man, 
prudently  abased  before  the  throne  of  God.  The 
things  he  chiefly  argued  for  were  anti-Christian 
things — the  abandonment  of  the  purely  moral 
view  of  life,  the  rehabilitation  of  instinct,  the  de- 
thronement of  weakness  and  timidity  as  ideals, 
the  renuneiation  of  the  whole  hocus-pocus  of  dog- 
matic religion,  the  extermination  of  false  aristoc- 
racies (of  the  priest,  of  the  politician,  of  the  plu- 
tocrat), the  revival  of  the  healthy,  lordly  “inno- 
cence” that  was  Greek.  If  he  was  anything  in  a 
word,  Nietzsche  was  a Greek  bom  two  thousand 
— 12— 


INTRODUCTION 


years  too  late.  His  dreams  were  thoroughly 
Hellenic;  his  whole  manner  of  thinking  was  Hel- 
lenic; his  peculiar  errors  were  Hellenic  no  less. 
But  his  Hellenism,  I need  not  add,  was  anything 
hut  the  pale  neo-Platonism  that  has  run  like  a 
thread  through  the  thinking  of  the  Western  world 
since  the  days  of  the  Christian  Fathers.  [From 
Plato,  to  be  sure,  he  got  what  all  of  us  must  get, 
but  his  real  forefather  was  Heraclitus^  It  is  in 
Heraclitus  that  one  finds  the  germ  of  his  primary 
view  of  the  universe — a view,  to  wit,  that  sees  it, 
not  as  moral  phenomenon,  but  as  mere  aesthetic 
representation.  The  God  that  Nietzsche  imag- 
ined, in  the  end,  was  not  far  from  the  God  that 
such  an  artist  as  Joseph  Conrad  imagines — a sii- 
preme  craftsman,  ever  experimenting,  ever  com- 
ing closer  to  an  ideal  balancing  of  lines  and 
forces,  and  yet  always  failing  to  work  out  the 
final  harmony. 

The  late  war,  awakening  all  the  primitive  ra- 
cial fury  of  the  Western  nations,  and  therewith 
all  their  ancient  enthusiasm  for  religious  taboos 
and  sanctions,  naturally  focused  attention  upon 
Nietzsche,  as  upon  the  most  daring  and  provoca- 
tive of  recent  amateur  theologians.  The  Ger- 
mans, with  their  characteristic  tendency  to  ex- 
— 13  — 


INTRODUCTION 


plain  their  every  act,  in  terms  as  realistic  and  un- 
pleasant as  possible,  appear  to  have  mauled  him 
in  a belated  and  unexpected  embrace,  to  the  hor- 
ror, I daresay,  of  the  Kaiser,  and  perhaps  to  the 
even  greater  horror  of  Nietzsche’s  own  ghost. 
The  folks  of  Anglo-Saxondom,  with  their  equally 
characteristic  tendency  to  explain  all  their  enter- 
prises romantically,  simultaneously  set  him  up  as 
the  Antichrist  he  no  doubt  secretly  longed  to  be. 
The  result  was  a great  deal  of  misrepresentation 
and  misunderstanding  of  him.  From  the  pulpits 
of  the  allied  countries,  and  particularly  from 
those  of  England  and  the  United  States,  a horde 
of  patriotic  ecclesiastics  denounced  him  in  ex- 
travagant terms  as  the  author  of  all  the  horrors  of 
the  time,  and  in  the  newspapers,  until  the  Kaiser 
was  elected  sole  bugaboo,  he  shared  the  honors  of 
that  office  with  von  Hindenburg,  the  Crown 
Prince,  Capt.  Boy-Ed,  von  Bernstorff  and  von 
Tirpitz.  Most  of  this  denunciation,  of  course, 
was  frankly  idiotic — the  naive  prattle  of  su- 
burban Methodists,  notoriety-seeking  college  pro- 
fessors, almost  illiterate  editorial  writers,  and 
other  such  numskulls.  In  much  of  it,  including 
not  a few  official  hymns  of  hate,  Nietzsche  was 
gravely  discovered  to  be  the  teacher  of  such 
— 14  — 


INTRODUCTION 


spokesmen  of  the  extremest  sort  of  German  na- 
tionalism as  von  Bemhardi  and  von  Treitschke 
— ^which  was  just  as  intelligent  as  making  George 
Bernard  Shaw  the  mentor  of  Lloyd-George.  In 
other  solemn  pronunciamentoes  he  was  credited 
with  being  philosophically  responsible  for  vari- 
ous imaginary  crimes  of  the  enemy — the  whole- 
sale slaughter  or  mutilation  of  prisoners  of  war, 
the  deliberate  burning  down  of  Red  Cross  hos- 
pitals, the  utilization  of  the  corpses  of  the  slain 
for  soap-making.  I amused  myself,  in  those 
gaudy  days,  by  collecting  newspaper  clippings 
to  this  general  effect,  and  later  on  I shall  prob- 
ably publish  a digest  of  them,  as  a contribution 
to  the  study  of  war  hysteria.  The  thing  went  to 
unbelievable  lengths.  On  the  strength  of  the 
fact  that  I had  published  a book  on  Nietzsche  in 
1906,  six  years  after  his  death,  I was  called 
upon  by  agents  of  the  Department  of  Justice, 
elaborately  outfitted  with  badges,  to  meet  the 
charge  that  I was  an  intimate  associate  and 
agent  of  “the  German  monster,  Nietzsky.”  I 
quote  the  official  proces  verbal,  an  indignant  but 
often  misspelled  document.  Alas,  poor  Nietz- 
sche! After  all  his  laborious  efforts  to  prove 
that  he  was  not  a German,  but  a Pole — even 
— 15  — 


INTRODUCTION 


after  his  heroic  readiness,  via  anti-anti-Semi- 
tism, to  meet  the  deduction  that,  if  a Pole,  then 
probably  also  a Jew! 

But  under  all  this  alarmed  and  preposterous 
tosh  there  was  at  least  a sound  instinct,  and  that 
was  the  instinct  which  recognized  Nietzsche  as 
the  most  eloquent,  pertinacious  and  effective  of 
all  the  critics  of  the  philosophy  to  which  the  Al- 
lies against  Germany  stood  committed,  and  on 
the  strength  of  which,  at  all  events  in  theory,  the 
United  States  had  engaged  itself  in  the  war.  He 
was  not,  in  point  of  fact,  involved  with  the  vis- 
ible enemy,  save  in  remote  and  transient  ways; 
the  German,  officially,  remained  the  most  ardent 
of  Christians  during  the  war  and  became  a demo- 
crat at  its  close.  But  he  was  plainly  a foe  of  de- 
mocracy in  all  its  forms,  political,  religious  and 
epistemological,  and  what  is  worse,  his  opposi- 
tion was  set  forth  in  terms  that  were  not  only  ex- 
traordinarily penetrating  and  devastating,  but 
also  uncommonly  offensive.  It  was  thus  quite 
natural  that  he  should  have  aroused  a degree  of 
indignation  verging  upon  the  pathological  in  the 
two  countries  that  had  planted  themselves  upon 
the  democratic  platform  most  boldly,  and  that 
felt  it  most  shaky,  one  may  add,  under  their  feet. 

— 16  — 


INTRODUCTION 

I daresay  that  Nietzsche,  had  he  been  alive, 
would  have  got  a lot  of  satisfaction  out  of  the 
execration  thus  heaped  upon  him,  not  only  be- 
cause, being  a vain  fellow,  he  enjoyed  execra- 
tion as  a tribute  to  his  general  singularity,  and 
hence  to  his  superiority,  but  also  and  more  im- 
portantly because,  being  no  mean  psychologist, 
he  would  have  recognized  the  disconcerting 
doubts  underlying  it.  If  Nietzsche’s  criticism 
of  democracy  were  as  ignorant  and  empty,  say, 
as  the  average  evangelical  clergyman’s  criticism 
of  Darwin’s  hypothesis  of  natural  selection,  then 
the  advocates  of  democracy  could  afford  to  dis- 
miss it  as  loftily  as  the  Darwinians  dismiss  the 
blather  of  the  holy  clerks.  And  if  his  attack 
upon  Christianity  were  mere  sound  and  fury, 
signifying  nothing,  then  there  would  be  no  call 
for  anathemas  from  the  sacred  desk.  But  these 
onslaughts,  in  point  of  fact,  have  behind  them  a 
tremendous  learning  and  a great  deal  of  point 
and  plausibility — there  are,  in  brief,  bullets  in 
the  gun,  teeth  in  the  tiger, — and  so  it  is  no  won- 
der that  they  excite  the  ire  of  men  who  hold,  as  a 
primary  article  of  belief,  that  their  acceptance 
would  destroy  civilization,  darken  the  sun,  and 
bring  Jahveh  to  sobs  upon  His  Throne. 

— 17  — 


INTRODUCTION 


But  in  all  this  justifiable  fear,  of  course,  there 
remains  a false  assumption,  and  that  is  the  as- 
sumption that  Nietzsche  proposed  to  destroy 
Christianity  altogether,  and  so  rob  the  plain  peo- 
ple of  the  world  of  their  virtue,  their  spiritual 
consolations,  and  their  hope  of  heaven.  Noth- 
ing could  be  more  untrue.  The  fact  is  that 
Nietzsche  had  no  interest  whatever  in  the  delu- 
sions of  the  plain  people — that  is,  intrinsically. 
It  seemed  to  him  of  small  moment  what  they  be- 
lieved, so  long  as  it  was  safely  imbecile.  What 
he  stood  against  was  not  their  beliefs,  but  the 
elevation  of  those  beliefs,  by  any  sort  of  demo- 
cratic process,  to  the  dignity  of  a state  philos- 
ophy— what  he  feared  most  was  the  pollution 
and  crippling  of  the  superior  minority  by  intel- 
lectual disease  from  below.  His  plain  aim  in 
“The  Antichrist”  was  to  combat  that  menace  by 
completing  the  work  begun,  on  the  one  hand,  by 
Darwin  and  the  other  evolutionist  philosophers, 
and,  on  the  other  hand,  by  German  historians  and 
philologians.  The  net  effect  of  this  earlier  at- 
tack, in  the  eighties,  had  been  the  collapse  of 
Christian  theology  as  a serious  concern  of  edu- 
cated men.  The  mob,  it  must  be  obvious,  was 
very  little  shaken;  even  to  this  day  it  has  not  put 
— 18  — 


INTRODUCTION 


off  its  belief  in  the  essential  Christian  doctrines. 
But  the  intelligentsia,  by  1885,  had  been  pretty 
well  convinced.  No  man  of  sound  information, 
at  the  time  Nietzsehe  planned  “The  Antichrist,” 
actually  believed  that  the  world  was  created  in 
seven  days,  or  that  its  fauna  was  once  over- 
whelmed by  a flood  as  a penalty  for  the  sins  of 
man,  or  that  Noah  saved  the  boa  constrictor,  the 
prairie  dog  and  the  pediculus  capitis  by  taking 
a pair  of  each  into  the  ark,  or  that  Lot’s  wife  was 
turned  into  a pillar  of  salt,  or  that  a fragment  of 
the  True  Cross  could  cure  hydrophobia.  Such 
notions,  still  almost  universally  prevalent  in 
Christendom  a century  before,  were  now  confined 
to  the  great  body  of  ignorant  and  credulous  men 
— that  is,  to  ninety-five  or  ninety-six  percent,  of 
the  race.  For  a man  of  the  superior  minority 
to  subscribe  to  one  of  them  publicly  was  already 
suflBcient  to  set  him  off  as  one  in  imminent  need 
of  psychiatrical  attention.  Belief  in  them  had 
become  a mark  of  inferiority,  like  the  allied  be- 
lief in  madstones,  magic  and  apparitions. 

But  though  the  theology  of  Christianity  had 
thus  sunk  to  the  lowly  estate  of  a mere  delusion 
of  the  rabble,  propagated  on  that  level  by  the 
ancient  caste  of  sacerdotal  parasites,  the  ethics 
— 19  — 


INTRODUCTION 


of  Christianity  continued  to  enjoy  the  utmost  ac- 
ceptance, and  perhaps  even  more  acceptance  than 
ever  before.  It  seemed  to  be  generally  felt,  in 
fact,  that  they  simply  must  be  saved  from  the 
wreck — that  the  world  would  vanish  into  chaos 
if  they  went  the  way  of  the  revelations  support- 
ing them.  In  this  fear  a great  many  judicious 
men  joined,  and  so  there  arose  what  was,  in  es- 
sence, an  absolutely  new  Christian  cult — a cult, 
to  wit,  purged  of  all  the  supematuralism  super- 
imposed upon  the  older  cult  by  generations  of 
theologians,  and  harking  back  to  what  was  con- 
ceived to  be  the  pure  ethical  doctrine  of  Jesus. 
This  cult  still  flourishes;  Protestantism  tends  to 
become  identical  with  it;  it  invades  Catholicism 
as  Modernism;  it  is  supported  by  great  numbers 
of  men  whose  intelligence  is  manifest  and 
whose  sincerity  is  not  open  to  question.  Even 
Nietzsche  himself  yielded  to  it  in  weak  moments, 
as  you  will  discover  on  examining  his  somewhat 
laborious  effort  to  make  Paul  the  villain  of  Chris- 
tian theology,  and  Jesus  no  more  than  an  inno- 
cent bystander.  But  this  sentimental  yielding 
never  went  far  enough  to  distract  his  attention 
for  long  from  his  main  idea,  which  was  this:  that 
Christian  ethics  were  quite  as  dubious,  at  bot- 
— 20  — 


INTRODUCTION 


tom,  as  Christian  theology — that  they  were 
founded,  just  as  surely  as  such  childish  fables  as 
the  story  of  Jonah  and  the  whale,  upon  the  pe- 
culiar prejudices  and  credulities,  the  special  de- 
sires and  appetites,  of  inferior  men — that  they 
warred  upon  the  best  interests  of  men  of  a better 
sort  quite  as  unmistakably  as  the  most  extrava- 
gant of  objective  superstitions.  In  brief,  what 
he  saw  in  Christian  ethics,  under  all  the  poetry 
and  all  the  line  show  of  altruism  and  all  the 
theoretical  benefits  therein,  was  a democratic 
effort  to  curb  the  egoism  of  the  strong — a con- 
spiracy of  the  chandala  against  the  free  func- 
tioning of  their  superiors,  nay,  against  the  free 
progress  of  mankind.  This  theory  is  the  thing 
he  exposes  in  “The  Antichrist,”  bringing  to  the 
business  his  amazingly  chromatic  and  exigent 
eloquence  at  its  finest  flower.  This  is  the  “con- 
spiracy” he  sets  forth  in  all  the  panoply  of  his 
characteristic  italics,  dashes,  sforzando  interjec- 
tions and  exclamation  points. 

Well,  an  idea  is  an  idea.  The  present  one 
may  be  right  and  it  may  be  wrong.  One  thing 
is  quite  certain:  that  no  progress  will  be  made 
against  it  by  denouncing  it  as  merely  immoral. 
If  it  is  ever  laid  at  all,  it  must  be  laid  evidenti- 
— 21  — 


INTRODUCTION 


ally,  logically.  The  notion  to  the  contrary  is 
thoroughly  democratic;  the  mob  is  the  most  ruth- 
less of  tyrants;  it  is  always  in  a democratic  so- 
ciety that  heresy  and  felony  tend  to  be  most  con- 
stantly confused.  One  hears  without  surprise  of 
a Bismarck  philosophizing  placidly  (at  least  in 
his  old  age)  upon  the  delusion  of  Socialism  and 
of  a Frederick  the  Great  playing  the  hose  of 
his  eynieism  upon  the  absolutism  that  was  almost 
identical  with  his  own  person,  but  men  in  the 
mass  never  brook  the  destructive  diseussion  of 
their  fundamental  beliefs,  and  that  impatience  is 
naturally  most  evident  in  those  soeieties  in  which 
men  in  the  mass  are  most  influential.  Democ- 
raey  and  free  speech  are  not  facets  of  one  gem; 
democracy  and  free  speech  are  eternal  enemies. 
But  in  any  battle  between  an  institution  and  an 
idea,  the  idea,  in  the  long  run,  has  the  better  of  it. 
Here  I do  not  venture  into  the  absurdity  of  argu- 
ing that,  as  the  world  wags  on,  the  truth  always 
survives.  I believe  nothing  of  the  sort.  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  it  seems  to  me  that  an  idea  that 
happens  to  be  true — or,  more  exactly,  as  near  to 
truth  as  any  human  idea  can  be,  and  yet  remain 
generally  intelligible — it  seems  to  me  that  such 
an  idea  carries  a special  and  often  fatal  handi- 
— 22  — 


INTRODUCTION 


cap.  The  majority  of  men  prefer  delusion  to 
truth.  It  soothes.  It  is  easy  to  grasp.  Above 
all,  it  fits  more  snugly  than  the  truth  into  a uni- 
verse of  false  appearances — of  complex  and  ir- 
rational phenomena,  defectively  grasped.  But 
though  an  idea  that  is  true  is  thus  not  likely  to 
prevail,  an  idea  that  is  attacked  enjoys  a great 
advantage.  The  evidence  behind  it  is  now  sup- 
ported by  sympathy,  the  sporting  instinct,  senti- 
mentality— and  sentimentality  is  as  powerful  as 
an  army  with  banners.  One  never  hears  of  a 
martyr  in  history  whose  notions  are  seriously  dis- 
puted today.  The  forgotten  ideas  are  those  of 
the  men  who  put  them  forward  soberly  and 
quietly,  hoping  fatuously  that  they  would  con- 
quer by  tho  force  of  their  truth;  these  are  the 
ideas  that  we  now  struggle  to  rediscover.  Had 
Nietzsche  lived  to  be  burned  at  the  stake  by  out- 
raged Mississippi  Methodists,  it  would  have  been 
a glorious  day  for  his  doctrines.  As  it  is,  they' 
are  helped  on  their  way  every  time  they  are  de- 
nounced as  immoral  and  against  God.  The  war 
brought  down  upon  them  the  maledictions  of  vast 
herds  of  right-thinking  men.  And  now  “The 
Antichrist,”  after  long  neglect,  is  being  reprinted 
and  read  again.  . . . 


23 


INTRODUCTION 


One  imagines  the.  author,  a sardonic  wraith, 
snickering  somewhat  sadly  over  the  fact.  His 
shade,  wherever  it  suffers,  is  favoured  in  these 
days  by  many  such  consolations,  some  of  them 
of  much  greater  horsepower.  Think  of  the 
facts  and  arguments,  even  the  underlying 
theories  and  attitudes,  that  have  been  borrowed 
from  him,  consciously  and  unconsciously,  by 
the  foes  of  Bolshevism  during  these  last  thrill- 
ing years!  The  face  of  democracy,  suddenly 
seen  hideously  close,  has  scared  the  guardians 
of  the  reigning  plutocracy  half  to  death,  and 
they  have  gone  to  the  devil  himself  for  aid. 
Southern  Senators,  almost  illiterate  men,  have 
mixed  his  acids  with  well  water  and  spouted 
them  like  affrighted  geysers,  not  knowing  what 
they  did.  Nor  are  they  the  first  to  borrow  from 
him.  Years  ago  I called  attention  to  the  debt 
incurred  with  characteristic  forgetfulness  of  ob- 
ligation by  the  late  Theodore  Roosevelt,  in  “The 
Strenuous  Life”  and  elsewhere.  Roosevelt,  a 
typical  apologist  for  the  existing  order,  adeptly 
dragging  a herring  across  the  trail  whenever  it 
was  menaced,  yet  managed  to  delude  the  native 
boobery,  at  least  until  toward  the  end,  into  ac- 
cepting him  as  a fiery  exponent  of  pure  democ- 
— 24  — 


INTRODUCTION 

racy.  Perhaps  he  even  fooled  himself;  charla- 
tans usually  do  so  soon  or  late.  A study  of 
Nietzsche  reveals  the  sources  of  much  that  was 
honest  in  him,  and  exposes  the  hollowness 
of  much  that  was  sham.  Nietzsche,  an  infi- 
nitely harder  and  more  courageous  intellect, 
was  incapable  of  any  such  confusion  of  ideas; 
he  seldom  allowed  sentimentality  to  turn  him 
from  the  glaring  fact.  What  is  called  Bol- 
shevism today  he  saw  clearly  a generation  ago 
and  described  for  what  it  was  and  is — democ- 
racy in  another  aspect,  the  old  resssentiment  of 
the  lower  orders  in  free  function  once  more. 
Socialism,  Puritanism,  Philistinism,  Christianity 
— ^he  saw  them  all  as  allotropic  forms  of  democ- 
racy, as  variations  upon  the  endless  struggle  of 
quantity  against  quality,  of  the  weak  and  timor- 
ous against  the  strong  and  enterprising,  of  the 
botched  against  the  fit.  The  world  needed  a 
staggering  exaggeration  to  make  it  see  even  half 
of  the  truth.  It  trembles  today  as  it  trembled 
during  the  French  Revolution.  Perhaps  it 
would  tremble  less  if  it  could  combat  the  mon- 
ster with  a clearer  conscience  and  less  burden  of 
compromising  theory — if  it  could  launch  its 
forces  frankly  at  the  fundamental  doctrine,  and 
— 25  — 


INTRODUCTION 


not  merely  employ  them  to  police  the  transient 
orgy. 

Nietzsche,  in  the  long  run,  may  help  it  toward 
that  greater  honesty.  His  notions,  propagated 
by  cuttings  from  cuttings  from  cuttings,  may  con- 
ceivably prepare  the  way  for  a sounder,  more 
healthful  theory  of  society  and  of  the  state,  and 
so  free  human  progress  from  the  stupidities 
which  now  hamper  it,  and  men  of  true  vision 
from  the  despairs  which  now  sicken  them.  I say 
it  is  conceivable,  but  I doubt  that  it  is  probable. 
The  soul  and  the  belly  of  mankind  are  too  evenly 
balanced  ; it  is  not  likely  that  the  belly  will  ever 
put  away  its  hunger  or  forget  its  power.  Here, 
perhaps,  there  is  an  example  of  the  eternal  re- 
currence that  Nietzsche  was  fond  of  mulling  over 
in  his  blacker  moods.  We  are  in  the  midst  of 
one  of  the  perennial  risings  of  the  lower  orders. 
It  got  under  way  long  before  any  of  the  current 
Bolshevist  demons  was  born;  it  was  given  its 
long,  secure  start  by  the  intolerable  tyranny  of 
the  plutocracy — the  end  product  of  the  Eight- 
eenth Century  revolt  against  the  old  aristocracy. 
It  found  resistance  suddenly  slackened  by  civil 
war  within  the  plutocracy  itself — one  gang  of 
traders  falling  upon  another  gang,  to  the  tune  of 
— 26  — 


INTRODUCTION 


vast  hymn-singing  and  yells  to  God.  Perhaps  it 
has  already  passed  its  apogee;  the  plutocraey, 
chastened,  shows  signs  of  a new  solidarity;  the 
wheel  continues  to  swing  ’round.  But  this  com- 
bat between  proletariat  and  plutocracy  is,  after 
all,  itself  a civil  war.  Two  inferiorities  strug- 
gle for  the  privilege  of  polluting  the  world. 
What  actual  difference  does  it  make  to  a civilized 

man,  when  there  is  a steel  strike,  whether  the 
workmen  win  or  the  mill-owners  win?  The  con- 
flict can  interest  him  only  as  spectacle,  as  the 
conflict  between  Bonaparte  and  the  old  order  in 
Europe  interested  Goethe  and  Beethoven.  The 
victory,  whichever  way  it  goes,  will  simply  bring 
chaos  nearer,  and  so  set  the  stage  for  a genuine 
revolution  later  on,  with  (let  us  hope)  a new 
feudalism  or  something  better  coming  out  of  it, 
and  a new  Thirteenth  Century  at  dawn.  This 
seems  to  be  the  slow,  costly  way  of  the  worst  of 
habitable  worlds. 

In  the  present  case  my  money  is  laid  upon  the 
plutocracy.  It  will  win  because  it  will  be 

able,  in  the  long  run,  to  enlist  the  finer  intelli- 
gences. The  mob  and  its  maudlin  causes  at- 
tract only  sentimentalists  and  scoundrels,  chiefly 
the  latter.  Politics,  under  a democracy,  reduces 

— 27  — 


INTRODUCTION 


itself  to  a mere  struggle  for  office  by  flatterers  of 
the  proletariat;  even  when  a superior  man  pre- 
vails at  that  disgusting  game  he  must  prevail  at 
the  cost  of  his  self-respect.  Not  many  superior 
men  make  the  attempt.  The  average  great  cap- 
tain of  the  rabble,  when  he  is  not  simply  a 
weeper  over  irremediable  wrongs,  is  a hypocrite 
so  far  gone  that  he  is  unconscious  of  his  own 
hypocrisy — a slimy  fellow,  offensive  to  the  nose. 
The  plutocracy  can  recruit  measurably  more  re- 
spectable janissaries,  if  only  because  it  can  make 
self-interest  less  obviously  costly  to  amour 
propre.  Its  defect  and  its  weakness  lie  in  the 
fact  that  it  is  still  too  young  to  have  acquired 
dignity.  But  lately  sprung  from  the  mob  it 
now  preys  upon,  it  yet  shows  some  of  the  habits 
of  mind  of  that  mob:  it  is  blatant,  stupid,  igno- 
rant, lacking  in  all  delicate  instinct  and  govern- 
mental finesse.  Above  all,  it  remains  somewhat 
heavily  moral.  One  seldom  finds  it  undertak- 
ing one  of  its  characteristic  imbecilities  without 
offering  a sonorous  moral  reason;  it  spends  al- 
most as  much  to  support  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.,  vice- 
crusading, Prohibition  and  other  such  puerilities 
as  it  spends  upon  Congressmen,  strike-breakers, 
gun-men,  kept  patriots  and  newspapers.  In  Eng- 
— 28  — 


INTRODUCTION 

land  the  case  is  even  worse.  It  is  almost  impos- 
sible to  find  a wealthy  industrial  over  there  who 
is  not  also  an  eminent  non-conformist  layman, 
and  even  among  financiers  there  are  praying 
brothers.  On  the  Continent,  the  day  is  saved  by 
the  fact  that  the  plutocracy  tends  to  become  more 
and  more  Jewish,  Here  the  intellectual  cyni- 
cism of  the  Jew  almost  counterbalances  his  social 
ungracefulness.  If  he  is  destined  to  lead  the 
plutocracy  of  the  world  out  of  Little  Bethel  he 
will  fail,  of  course,  to  turn  it  into  an  aristocracy 
— i.  e.,  a caste  of  gentlemen — , but  he  will  at 
least  make  it  intelligent,  and  hence  worthy  of 
respect.  The  case  against  the  Jews  is  long  and 
damning;  it  would  justify  ten  times  as  much  prej- 
udice as  they  now  encounter  in  the  world.  But 
whenever  you  find  a Davidsbiindlerschaft  mak- 
ing practise  against  the  Philistines,  there  you 
will  find  a Jew  laying  on.  Maybe  it  was  this 
fact  that  caused  Nietzsche  to  speak  up  for  the 
children  of  Israel  quite  as  often  as  he  spoke 
against  them.  He  was  not  blind  to  their  faults, 
but  when  he  set  them  beside  Christians  he  could 
not  deny  their  general  superiority.  Perhaps  in 
America  and  England,  as  on  the  Continent,  the 
increasing  Jewishness  of  the  plutocracy,  while 
— 29  — 


INTRODUCTION 


cutting  it  off  from  all  chance  of  ever  developing 
into  an  aristocracy,  will  yet  lift  it  to  such  a 
dignity  that  it  will  at  least  deserve  a certain 
grudging  respect. 

But  even  so,  it  will  remain  in  a sort  of  half- 
world,  midway  between  the  gutter  and  the  stars. 
Above  it  will  still  stand  the  small  group  of  men 
that  constitutes  the  permanent  aristocracy  of  the 
race — the  men  of  imagination  and  high  purpose, 
the  makers  of  genuine  progress,  the  brave  and 
ardent  spirits,  above  all  petty  fears  and  discon- 
tents and  above  all  petty  hopes  and  ideals  no  less. 
There  were  heroes  before  Agamemnon;  there 
will  be  Bachs  after  Johann  Sebastian.  And  be- 
neath the  Judaized  plutocracy,  the  sublimated 
bourgeoisie,  there  the  immemorial  proletariat,  I 
venture  to  guess,  will  roar  on,  endlessly  tortured 
by  its  vain  hatreds  and  envies,  stampeded  and 
made  to  tremble  by  its  ancient  superstitions, 
prodded  and  made  miserable  by  its  sordid  and 
degrading  hopes.  It  seems  to  me  very  likely 
that,  in  this  proletariat,  Christianity  will  con- 
tinue to  survive.  It  is  nonsense,  true  enough, 
but  it  is  sweet.  Nietzsche,  denouncing  its  dan- 
gers as  a poison,  almost  falls  into  the  error  of 
denying  it  its  undoubtedly  sugary  smack.  Of 
— 30  — 


INTRODUCTION 

all  the  religions  ever  devised  by  the  great  practi- 
cal jokers  of  the  race,  this  is  the  one  that  offers 
most  for  the  least  money,  so  to  speak,  to  the  infe- 
rior man.  It  starts  out  by  denying  his  inferi- 
ority in  plain  terms:  all  men  are  equal  in  the 
sight  of  God.  It  ends  by  erecting  that  inferior- 
ity into  a sort  of  actual  superiority:  it  is  a merit 
to  be  stupid,  and  miserable,  and  sorely  put  upon 
— of  such  are  the  celestial  elect.  Not  all  the  elo- 
quence of  a million  Nietzsches,  nor  all  the  pain- 
ful marshalling  of  evidence  of  a million  Dar- 
wins and  Harnacks,  will  ever  empty  that  great 
consolation  of  its  allure.  The  most  they  can  ever 
accomplish  is  to  make  the  superior  orders  of  men 
acutely  conscious  of  the  exact  nature  of  it,  and 
so  give  them  armament  against  the  contagion. 
This  is  going  on ; this  is  being  done.  I think  that 
“The  Antichrist”  has  a useful  place  in  that  enter- 
prise. It  is  strident,  it  is  often  extravagant,  it  is, 
to  many  sensitive  men,  in  the  worst  of  possible 
taste,  but  at  bottom  it  is  enormously  apt  and 
effective — and  on  the  surface  it  is  undoubtedly 
a good  show.  One  somehow  enjoys,  with  the 
malice  that  is  native  to  man,  the  spectacle  of  an- 
athemas batted  back;  it  is  refreshing  to  see  the 
pitchfork  employed  against  gentlemen  who  have 
— 31  — 


INTRODUCTION 


doomed  such  innumerable  caravans  to  hell.  In 
Nietzsche  they  found,  after  many  long  years,  a 
foeman  worthy  of  them — not  a mere  fancy 
swordsman  like  Voltaire,  or  a mob  orator  like 
Tom  Paine,  or  a pedant  like  the  heretics  of  ex- 
egesis, but  a gladiator  armed  with  steel  and  ar- 
moured with  steel,  and  showing  all  the  ferocious 
gusto  of  a mediaeval  bishop.  It  is  a pity  that 
Holy  Church  has  no  process  for  the  elevation  of 
demons,  like  its  process  for  the  canonization  of 
saints.  There  must  be  a long  roll  of  black  mir- 
acles to  the  discredit  of  the  Accursed  Friedrich — 
sinners  purged  of  conscience  and  made  happy  in 
their  sinning,  clerics  shaken  in  their  theology  by 
visions  of  a new  and  better  holy  city,  the  strong 
made  to  exult,  the  weak  robbed  of  their  old  sad 
romance.  It  would  be  a pleasure  to  see  the  Ad- 
vocatus  Diaboli  turn  from  the  table  of  the  prose- 
cution to  the  table  of  the  defence,  and  move  in 
solemn  form  for  the  damnation  of  the  Naumburg 
hobgoblin.  . . . 

Of  all  Nietzsche’s  books,  “The  Antichrist” 
comes  nearest  to  conventionality  in  form.  It 
presents  a connected  argument  with  very  few  in- 
terludes, and  has  a beginning,  a middle  and  an 
end.  Most  of  his  works  are  in  the  form  of  col- 
— 32  — 


INTRODUCTION 

lections  of  apothegms,  and  sometimes  the  sub- 
ject changes  on  every  second  page.  This  fact 
constitutes  one  of  the  counts  in  the  orthodox  in- 
dictment of  him:  it  is  cited  as  proof  that  his  ca- 
pacity for  consecutive  thought  was  limited,  and 
that  he  was  thus  deficient  mentally,  and  perhaps 
a downright  moron.  The  argument,  it  must  be 
obvious,  is  fundamentally  nonsensical.  What 
deceives  the  professors  is  the  traditional  prolix- 
ity of  philosophers.  Because  the  average  philo- 
sophical writer,  when  he  essays  to  expose  his 
ideas,  makes  such  inordinate  drafts  upon  the 
parts  of  speech  that  the  dictionary  is  almost  emp- 
tied these  defective  observers  jump  to  the  conclu- 
sion that  his  intrinsic  notions  are  of  correspond- 
ing weight.  This  is  not  unseldom  quite  untrue. 
What  makes  philosophy  so  garrulous  is  not  the 
profundity  of  philosophers,  but  their  lack  of  art; 
they  are  like  physicians  who  sought  to  cure  a 
slight  hyperacidity  by  giving  the  patient  a car- 
load of  burned  oyster-shells  to  eat.  There  is, 
too,  the  endless  poll-parrotting  that  goes  on : each 
new  philosopher  must  prove  his  learning  by  la- 
boriously rehearsing  the  ideas  of  all  previ- 
ous philosophers.  . . . Nietzsche  avoided  both 
faults.  He  always  assumed  that  his  readers 
— 33  — 


INTRODUCTION 


knew  the  books,  and  that  it  was  thus  unnecessary 
to  rewrite  them.  And,  having  an  idea  that 
seemed  to  him  to  be  novel  and  original,  he  stated 
it  in  as  few  words  as  possible,  and  then  shut 
down.  Sometimes  he  got  it  into  a hundred 
words ; sometimes  it  took  a . thousand ; now  and 
then,  as  in  the  present  case,  he  developed  a series 
of  related  ideas  into  a connected  book.  But  he 
never  wrote  a word  too  many.  He  never 
pumped  up  an  idea  to  make  it  appear  bigger 
than  it  actually  was.  The  pedagogues,  alas,  are 
not  accustomed  to  that  sort  of  writing  in  serious 
fields.  They  resent  it,  and  sometimes  they  even 
try  to  improve  it.  There  exists,  in  fact,  a huge 
and  solemn  tome  on  Nietzsche  by  a learned  man 
of  America  in  which  all  of  his  brilliancy  is  pain- 
fully translated  into  the  windy  phrases  of  the 
seminaries.  The  tome  is  satisfactorily  ponder- 
ous, but  the  meat  of  the  cocoanut  is  left  out:  there 
is  actually  no  discussion  of  the  Nietzschean  view 
of  Christianity!  . . . Always  Nietzsche  daunts 
the  pedants.  He  employed  too  few  words  for 
them — and  he  had  too  many  ideas. 

The  present  translation  of  “The  Antichrist”  is 
published  by  agreement  with  Dr.  Oscar  Levy, 
— 34  — 


INTRODUCTION 


editor  of  the  English  edition  of  Nietzsche. 
There  are  two  earlier  translations,  one  by 
Thomas  Common  and  the  other  by  Anthony  M. 
Ludovici.  That  of  Mr.  Common  follows  the 
text  very  closely,  and  thus  occasionally  shows 
some  essentially  German  turns  of  phrase ; that  of 
Mr.  Ludovici  is  more  fluent  but  rather  less  exact. 
I do  not  offer  my  own  version  on  the  plea  that 
either  of  these  is  useless;  on  the  contrary,  I 
cheerfully  acknowledge  that  they  have  much 
merit,  and  that  they  helped  me  at  almost  every 
line.  I began  this  new  Englishing  of  the  book, 
not  in  any  hope  of  supplanting  them,  and  surely 
not  with  any  notion  of  meeting  a great  public 
need,  but  simply  as  a private  amusement  in 
troubled  days.  But  as  I got  on  with  it  I began 
to  see  ways  of  putting  some  flavour  of  Nietzsche’s 
peculiar  style  into  the  English,  and  so  amusement 
turned  into  a more  or  less  serious  labour.  The 
result,  of  course,  is  far  from  satisfactory,  but  it 
at  least  represents  a very  diligent  attempt. 
Nietzsche,  always  under  the  influence  of  French 
models,  wrote  a German  that  differs  materially 
from  any  other  German  that  I know.  It  is  more 
nervous,  more  varied,  more  rapid  in  tempo;  it 
runs  to  more  effective  climaxes;  it  is  never 
— 35  — 


INTRODUCTION 


stodgy.  His  marks  begin  to  show  upon  the  writ- 
ing of  the  younger  Germans  of  today.  They  are 
getting  away  from  the  old  thunderous  manner, 
with  its  long  sentences  and  its  tedious  gram- 
matical complexities.  In  the  course  of  time,  I 
daresay,  they  will  develop  a German  almost  as 
clear  as  French  and  almost  as  colourful  and  resil- 
ient as  English. 

I owe  thanks  to  Dr.  Levy  for  his  imprimatur, 
to  Mr.  Theodor  Hemberger  for  criticism,  and  to 
Messrs.  Common  and  Ludovici  for  showing  me 
the  way  around  many  a difficulty. 

H.  L.  Mencken. 


— 36  — 


PREFACE 


This  book  belongs  to  the  most  rare  of  men. 
Perhaps  not  one  of  them  is  yet  alive.  It  is  pos- 
sible that  they  may  be  among  those  who  under- 
stand my  “Zarathustra”:  how  could  I confound 
myself  with  those  who  are  now  sprouting  ears? — 
First  the  day  after  tomorrow  must  come  for  me. 
Some  men  are  bom  posthumously. 

The  conditions  under  which  any  one  under- 
stands me,  and  necessarily  understands  me — I 
know  them  only  too  well.  Even  to  endure  my 
seriousness,  my  passion,  he  must  carry  intel- 
lectual integrity  to  the  verge  of  hardness.  h3 
must  be  accustomed  to  living  on  mountain  tops 
— and  to  looking  upon  the  wretched  gabble  of 
politics  and  nationalism  as  beneath  him.  He 
must  have  become  indifferent;  he  must  never 
ask  of  the  truth  whether  it  brings  profit  to  him 
or  a fatality  to  him.  . . . He  must  have  an 
inclination,  bom  of  strength,  for  questions  that 
no  one  has  the  courage  for;  the  courage  for  the 
forbidden;  predestination  for  the  labyrinth. 
— 37  — 


PREFACE 


The  experience  of  seven  solitudes.  New  ears 
for  new  music.  New  eyes  for  what  is  most 
distant.  A new  conscience  for  truths  that  have 
hitherto  remained  unheard.J  And  the  will  to 
economize  in  the  grand  manner — to  hold  to- 
gether his  strength,  his  enthusiasm.  . . . Rev- 
erence for  self;  love  of  self;  absolute  freedom 
of  self.  . . . 

Very  well,  then!  of  that  sort  only  are  my 
readers,  my  true  readers,  my  readers  foreor- 
dained: of  what  account  are  the  rest? — The  rest 
are  merely  humanity. — One  must  make  one’s 
self  superior  to  humanity,  in  power,  in  loftiness 
of  soul, — in  contempt. 

Friedrich  W.  Nietzsche. 


— 38  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


1. 

— Let  us  look  each  other  in  the  face.  We 
are  Hyperboreans — ^we  know  well  enough  how 
remote  our  place  is.  “Neither  by  land  nor  by 
water  will  you  find  the  road  to  the  Hyper- 
boreans”: even  Pindar,^  in  his  day,  knew  that 
much  about  us.  Beyond  the  North,  beyond  the 
ice,  beyond  death — our  life,  our  happiness. 
. . . We  have  discovered  that  happiness;  we 
know  the  way;  we  got  our  knowledge  of  it  from 
thousands  of  years  in  the  labyrinth.  Who  else 
has  found  it? — The  man  of  today? — “I  don’t 
know  either  the  way  out  or  the  way  in;  I am 
whatever  doesn’t  know  either  the  way  out  or  the 
way  in” — so  sighs  the  man  of  today.  . . . 
This  is  the  sort  of  modernity  that  made  us  ill, 
— we  sickened  on  lazy  peace,  cowardly  compro- 

1 Cf.  the  tenth  Pythian  ode.  See  also  the  fourth  book  of 
Herodotus.  The  Hyperboreans  were  a mythical  people  beyond 
the  Rhipaean  mountains,  in  the  far  North.  They  enjoyed  un- 
broken happiness  and  perpetual  youth. 

— 41  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


mise,  the  whole  virtuous  dirtiness  of  the  modern 
Yea  and  Nay.  This  tolerance  and  largeur  of 
the  heart  that  “forgives”  everything  because  it 
“understands”  everything  is  a sirocco  to  us. 
Rather  live  ^mid  the  ice  than  among  modern 
virtues  and  other  such  south-winds!  ...  We 
were  brave  enough;  we  spared  neither  ourselves 
nor  others;  but  we  were  a long  time  finding 
out  where  to  direct  our  courage.  We  grew  dis- 
mal; they  called  us  fatalists.  Our  fate — it  was 
the  fulness,  the  tension,  the  storing  up  of 
powers.  We  thirsted  for  the  lightnings  and 
great  deeds;  we  kept  as  far  as  possible  from  the 
happiness  of  the  weakling,  from  “resignation” 
. . . There  was  thunder  in  our  air;  nature, 
as  we  embodied  it,  became  overcast — for  we 
had  not  yet  found  the  way.  The  formula  of 
our  happiness:  a Yea,  a Nay,  a straight  line,  a 
goal.  . . . 

2. 

What  is  good? — ^Whatever  augments  the  feel- 
ing of  power,  the  will  to  power,  power  itself, 
in  man. 

What  is  evil? — Whatever  springs  from  weak- 
ness. 

— 42  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


What  is  happiness? — The  feeling  that  power 
increases — that  resistance  is  overcome. 

Not  contentment,  hut  more  power;  not  peace 
at  any  price,  but  war;  not  virtue,  but  efficiency 
(virtue  in  the  Renaissance  sense,  virtu,  virtue 
free  of  moral  acid). 

The  weak  and  the  botched  shall  perish:  first 
principle  of  our  charity.  And  one  should  help 
them  to  it. 

What  is  more  harmful  than  any  vice? — Prac- 
tical sympathy  for  the  botched  and  the  weak — 
Christianity.  . . . 

3. 

The  problem  that  I set  here  is  not  what  shall 
replace  mankind  in  the  order  of  living  creatures 
( — man  is  an  end — ) ; but  what  type  of  man 
must  be  bred,  must  be  willed,  as  being  the  most 
valuable,  the  most  worthy  of  life,  the  most 
secure  guarantee  of  the  future. 

This  more  valuable  type  has  appeared  often 
enough  in  the  past:  but  always  as  a happy  ac- 
cident, as  an  exception,  never  as  deliberately 
willed.  Very  often  it  has  been  precisely  the 
most  feared;  hitherto  it  has  been  almost  t^he 
terror  of  terrors; — and  out  of  that  terror  the 
— 43  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


contrary  type  has  been  willed,  cultivated  and 
attained:  the  domestie  animal,  the  herd  animal, 
the  sick  brute-man — the  Christian.  . . . 


Mankind  surely  does  not  represent  an  evolu- 
tion toward  a better  or  stronger  or  higher  level, 
as  progress  is  now  understood.  This  “prog- 


a  false  idea.  The  European  of  today,  in  his 
essential  worth,  falls  far  below  the  European  of 
the  Renaissance;  the  process  of  evolution  does 
not  necessarily  mean  elevation,  enhancement, 
strengthening. 

True  enough,  it  succeeds  in  isolated  and  in- 
dividual cases  in  various  parts  of  the  earth  and 
under  the  most  widely  different  cultures,  and 
in  these  cases  a higher  type  certainly  manifests 
itself;  something  whicl 


been  possible,  and  will  remain  possible,  perhaps, 
for  all  time  to  come.  Even  whole  races,  tribes 
and  nations  may  occasionally  represent  such 
lucky  accidents. 


4. 


ress”  is  merely  a modem  idea,  whieh  is  to  say. 


in  the  mass,  appears 

Sueh  happy  strokes  of  high  suecess  have^alwayC 


44 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


5. 

We  should  not  deck  out  and  embellish 
Christianity:  it  has  waged  a war  to  the  death 
against  this  higher  type  of  man,  it  has  put  all 
the  deepest  instincts  of  this  type  under  its  ban, 
it  has  developed  its  concept  of  evil,  of  the  Evil 
One  himself,  out  of  these  instincts — the  strong 
man  as  the_typical  reprobate,  the  “outcast  among 
men.”  Christianity  has  taken  the  part  of  all 
the  weak,  the  low,  the  botched;  it  has  made  an 
ideal  out  of  antagonism  to  all  the  self -preserva- 
tive instincts  of  sound  life ; it  has  corrupted  even 
the  faculties  of  {hose  natures  that  are  intellec- 
tually most  vigorous,  by  representing  the  high- 
est intellectual  values  as  sinful,  as  misleading, 
as  full  of  temptation.  The  most  lamentable 
example:  the  corruption  of  Pascal,  who  believed 
that  his  intellect  had  been  destroyed  by  original 
sin,  whereas  it  was  actually  destroyed  by 
Christianity! — 


6. 

It  is  a painful  and  tragic  spectacle  that  rises 
before  me:  I have  drawn  back  the  curtain  from 
the  rottenness  of  man.  This  word,  in  my  mouth, 
— 45  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


is  at  least  free  from  one  suspicion:  that  it  in- 
volves a moral  accusation  against  humanity. 
It  is  used — and  I wish  to  emphasize  the  fact 
again — without  any  moral  significance:  and  this 
is  so  far  true  that  the  rottenness  I speak  of  is 
most  apparent  to  me  precisely  in  those  quarters 
where  there  has  been  most  aspiration,  hitherto, 
toward  “virtue”  and  “godliness.”  As  you  prob- 
ably surmise,  I understand  rottem^s’s  in  the 
sense  of  decadence:  my  argument  'xs  that  all 
the  values  on  which  mankind  now  fixes  its  high- 
est aspirations  are  decadence-wahxes,. 

I call  an  animal,  a species,  an  individual 
corrupt,  when  it  loses  its  instincts,  when  it 
chooses,  when  it  prefers,  what  is  injurious  to 
it.  A history  of  the  “higher  feelings,”  the 
“ideals  of  humanity” — and  it  is  possible  that 
I’ll  have  to  write  it — would  almost  explain  why 
man  is  so  degenerate.  Life  itself  appears  to  me 
I as  an  instinct  for  growth,  for  survival,  for  the 
^ accumulation  of  forces,  for  power:  whenever 
the  will  to  power  fails  there  is  disaster.  My 
contention  is  that  all  the  highest  values  of 
humanity  have  been  emptied  of  this  will — that 
the  values  of  decadence,  of  nihilism,  now  pre- 
vail under  the  holiest  names. 

— 46  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


7. 

Christianity  is  called  the  religion  of  pity. — 
Pity  stands  in  opposition  to  all  the  tonic  pas- 
sions that  augment  the  energy  of  the  feeling 
of  aliveness:  it  is  a depressant.  A man  loses 
power  when  he  pities.  Through  pity  that  drain 
upon  strength  which  suffering  works  is  multi- 
plied a thousandfold.  Suffering  is  made  con- 
tagious by  pity;  under  certain  circumstances  it 
may  lead  to  a total  sacrifice  of  life  and  living 
energy — a loss  out  of  all  proportion  to  the 
magnitude  of  the  cause  ( — the  case  of  the  death 
of  the  Nazarene).  This  is  the  first  view  of  it; 
there  is,  however,  a still  more  important  one. 
If  one  measures  the  effects  of  pity  by  the  gravity 
of  the  reactions  it  sets  up,  its  character  as  a 
menace  to  life  appears  in  a much  clearer  light. 
Pity  thwarts  the  whole  law  of  evolution,  which 
is  the  law  of  natural  selection.  It  preserves 
whatever  is  ripe  for  destruction;  it  fights  on  the 
side  of  those  disinherited  and  condemned  by 
life;  by  maintaining  life  in  so  many  of  the 
botched  of  all  kinds,  it  gives  life  itself  a gloomy 
and  dubious  aspect.  Mankind  has  ventured  to 
call  pity  a virtue  ( — in  every  superior  moral 
— 47  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

system  it  appears  as  a weakness — ) ; going  still 
further,  it  has  been  called  the  virtue,  the  source 
and  foundation  of  all  other  virtues — but  let  us 
always  bear  in  mind  that  this  was  from  the 
standpoint  of  a philosophy  that  was  nihilistic, 
and  upon  whose  shield  the  denial  of  life  was 
inscribed.  Schopenhauer  was  right  in  this: 
that  by  means  of  pity  life  is  denied,  and  made 
worthy  of  denial — pity  is  the  technic  of 
nihilism.  Let  me  repeat:  this  depressing  and 
contagious  instinct  stands  against  all  those  in- 
stincts which  work  for  the  preservation  and  en- 
hancement of  life:  in  the  role  of  protector  of 
the  miserable,  it  is  a prime  agent  in  the  promo- 
tion of  decadence — pity  persuades  to  extinction. 
. . . Of  course,  one  doesn’t  say  “extinction”: 
one  says  “the  other  world,”  or  “God,”  or  “the 
true  life,”  or  Nirvana,  salvation,  blessedness. 
. . . This  innocent  rhetoric,  from  the  realm 
of  religious-ethical  balderdash,  appears  a good 
deal  less  innocent  when  one  reflects  upon  the 
tendency  that  it  conceals  beneath  sublime  words: 
the  tendency  to  destroy  life.  Schopenhauer 
was  hostile  to  life:  that  is  why  pity  appeared 
to  him  as  a virtue.  . . . Aristotle,  as  every 
one  knows,  saw  in  pity  a sickly  and  dangerous 
— 48  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


state  of  mind,  the  remedy  for  which  was  an  oc- 
casional purgative:  he  regarded  tragedy  as  that 
purgative.  The  instinct  of  life  should  prompt 
us  to  seek  some  means  of  puncturing  any  such 
pathological  and  dangerous  accumulation  of 
pity  as  that  appearing  in  Schopenhauer’s  case 
(and  also,  alack,  in  that  of  our  whole  literary 
decadence,  from  St.  Petersburg  to  Paris,  from 
Tolstoi  to  Wagner),  that  it  may  burst  and  be  dis- 
charged. . . . Nothing  is  more  unhealthy, 
amid  all  our  unhealthy  modernism,  than 
Christian  pity.  To  be  the  doctors  here,  to  be 
unmerciful  here,  to  wield  the  knife  here — all 
this  is  our  business,  all  this  is  our  sort  of  hu- 
manity, by  this  sign  we  are  philosophers,  we 
Hyperboreans ! — 

8. 

It  is  necessary  to  say  just  whom  we  regard  as 
our  antagonists:  theologians  and  all  who  have 
any  theological  blood  in  their  veins — this  is  our 
whole  philosophy.  . . . One  must  have  faced 
that  menace  at  close  hand,  better  still,  one  must 
have  had  experience  of  it  directly  and  almost 
succumbed  to  it,  to  realize  that  it  is  not  to  be 
taken  lightly  ( — the  alleged  free-thinking  of  our 
— 49  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

naturalists  and  physiologists  seems  to  me  to  be 
a joke — they  have  no  passion  about  such  things; 
they  have  not  suffered — ) . This  poisoning  goes 
a great  deal  further  than  most  people  think: 
I find  the  arrogant  habit  of  the  theologian 
among  all  who  regard  themselves  as  “idealists” 
— among  all  who,  by  virtue  of  a higher  point 
of  departure,  claim  a right  to  rise  above  reality, 
and  to  look  upon  it  with  suspicion.  . . . The 
idealist,  like  the  ecclesiastic,  carries  all  sorts  of 
lofty  concepts  in  his  hand  ( — and  not  only  in 
his  hand ! ) ; he  launches  them  with  benevolent 
contempt  against  “understanding,”  “die  senses,” 
“honor,”  “good  living,”  “science”;  he  sees  such 
things  as  beneath  him,  as  pernicious  and  se- 
ductive forces,  on  which  “the  soul”  soars  as  a 
pure  thing-in-itself — as  if  humility,  chastity, 
poverty,  in  a word,  holiness,  had  not  already 
done  much  more  damage  to  life  than  all 
imaginable  horrors  and  vices.  . . . The  pure 
soul  is  a pure  lie.  ...  So  long  as  the  priest, 
that  professional  denier,  calumniator  and 
poisoner  of  life,  is  accepted  as  a higher  variety 
of  man,  there  can  be  no  answer  to  the  ques- 
tion, What  is  truth?  Truth  has  already  been 
stood  on  its  head  when  the  obvious  attorney  of 
— 50  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


mere  emptiness  is  mistaken  for  its  representa- 
tive. . . . 

9. 

Upon  this  theological  instinct  I make  war:  I 
find  the  tracks  of  it  everywhere.  Whoever  has 
theological  blood  in  his  veins  is  shifty  and  dis- 
honourable in  all  things.  The  pathetic  thing 
that  grows  out  of  this  condition  is  called  faith: 
in  other  words,  closing  one’s  eyes  upon  one’s  self 
once  for  all,  to  avoid  suffering  the  sight  of  in- 
curable falsehood.  People  erect  a concept  of 
morality,  of  virtue,  of  holiness  upon  this  false 
view  of  all  things;  they  ground  good  conscience 
upon  faulty  vision;  they  argue  that  no  other  sort 
of  vision  has  value  any  more,  once  they  have 
made  theirs  sacrosanct  with  the  names  of  “God,” 
“salvation”  and  “eternity.”  I unearth  this 
theological  instinct  in  all  directions:  it  is  the 
most  widespread  and  the  most  subterranean 
form  of  falsehood  to  he  found  on  earth. 
Whatever  a theologian  regards  as  true  must  be 
false : there  you  have  almost  a criterion  of  truth. 
His  profound  instinct  of  self-preservation  stands 
against  truth  ever  coming  into  honour  in  any 
way,  or  even  getting  stated.  Wherever  the  in- 
— 51  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


fluence  of  theologians  is  felt  there  is  a trans- 
valuation of  values,  and  the  concepts  “true” 
and  “false”  are  forced  to  change  places:  what- 
ever is  most  damaging  to  life  is  there  called 
“true,”  and  whatever  exalts  it,  intensifies  it,  ap- 
proves it,  justifies  it  and  makes  it  triumphant 
is  there  called  “false.”  . . . When  theo- 
logians, working  through  the  “consciences”  of 
princes  (or  of  peoples — ),  stretch  out  their 
hands  for  power,  there  is  never  any  doubt  as  to 
the  fundamental  issue:  the  will  to  make  an  end, 
the  nihilistic  will  exerts  that  power.  . . . 

10. 

Among  Germans  I am  immediately  under- 
stood when  I say  that  theological  blood  is  the 
ruin  of  philosophy.  The  Protestant  pastor  is 
the  grandfather  of  German  philosophy;  Pro- 
testantism itself  is  its  peccatum  originale. 
Definition  of  Protestantism:  hemiplegic  paraly- 
sis of  Christianity — and  of  reason.  . . . One 
need  only  utter  the  words  “Tübingen  School” 
to  get  an  understanding  of  what  German  philoso- 
phy is  at  bottom — a very  artful  form  of  theol- 
ogy. . . . The  Suabians  are  the  best  liars  in 
Germany;  they  lie  innocently.  . . . Why  all 
— 52  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


the  rejoicing  over  the  appearance  of  Kant  that 
went  through  the  learned  world  of  Germany, 
three-fourths  of  which  is  made  up  of  the  sons 
of  preachers  and  teachers — why  the  German 
conviction  still  echoing,  that  with  Kant  came  a 
change  for  the  better?  The  theological  instinct 
of  German  scholars  made  them  see  clearly  just 
what  had  become  possible  again.  ...  A 
backstairs  leading  to  the  old  ideal  stood  open; 
the  concept  of  the  “true  world,”  the  concept 
of  morality  as  the  essence  of  the  world  ( — the 
two  most  vicious  errors  that  ever  existed!), 
were  once  more,  thanks  to  a subtle  and  wily 
scepticism,  if  not  actually  demonstrable,  then  at 
least  no  longer  refutable.  . . . Reason,  the 
prerogative  of  reason,  does  not  go  so  far.  . . . 
Out  of  reality  there  had  been  made  “appear- 
ance”; an  absolutely  false  world,  that  of  being, 
had  been  turned  into  reality.  . . . The  success 
of  Kant  is  merely  a theological  success;  he  was, 
like  Luther  and  Leibnitz,  but  one  more  impedi- 
ment to  German  integrity,  already  far  from 
steady. — 

11. 

A word  now  against  Kant  as  a moralist.  A 
virtue  must  be  our  invention;  it  must  spring  out 
— 53  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


of  our  personal  need  and  defence.  In  every 
other  case  it  is  a source  of  danger.  That  which 
does  not  belong  to  our  life  menaces  it;  a virtue 
which  has  its  roots  in  mere  respect  for  the  con- 
cept of  “virtue,”  as  Kant  would  have  it,  is 
pernicious.  “Virtue,”  “duty,”  “good  for  its 
own  sake,”  goodness  grounded  upon  impersonal- 
ity or  a notion  of  universal  validity — these  are 
all  chimeras,  and  in  them  one  finds  only  an  ex- 
•vpression  of  the  decay,  the  last  collapse  of  life, 
the  Chinese  spirit  of  Königsberg.  Quite  the 
contrary  is  demanded  by  the  most  profound  laws 
of  self-preservation  and  of  growth:  to  wit,  that 
every  man  find  his  own  virtue,  his  own 
[ categorical  imperative.  A nation  goes  to  pieces 
when  it  confounds  its  duty  with  the  general  con- 
cept of  duty.  Nothing  works  a more  complete 
and  penetrating  disaster  than  every  “imper- 
sonal” duty,  every  sacrifice  before  the  Moloch 
of  abstraction. — To  think  that  no  one  has 
thought  of  Kant’s  categorical  imperative  as 
dangerous  to  life!  . . . The  theological  in- 
stinct alone  took  it  under  protection! — An  action 
prompted  by  the  life-instinct  proves  that  it  is  a 
right  action  by  the  amount  of  pleasure  that  goes 
with  it:  and  yet  that  Nihilist,  with  his  bowels 
— 54  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


of  Christian  dogmatism,  regarded  pleasure  as 
an  objection.  . . . What  destroys  a man  more 
quickly  than  to  work,  think  and  feel  without 
inner  necessity,  without  any  deep  personal  de- 
sire, without  pleasure — as  a mere  automaton  of 
duty?  That  is  the  recipe  for  decadence,  and  no 
less  for  idiocy.  . . . Kant  became  an  idiot. 
— And  such  a man  was  the  contemporary  of 
Goethe!  This  calamitous  spinner  of  cobwebs 
passed  for  the  German  philosopher — still  passes 
today!  ...  I forbid  myself  to  say  what  I 
think  of  the  Germans.  . . . Didn’t  Kant  see 
in  the  French  Revolution  the  transformation  of 
the  state  from  the  inorganic  form  to  the  organic? 
Didn’t  he  ask  himself  if  there  was  a single  event 
that  could  be  explained  save  on  the  assumption 
of  a moral  faculty  in  man,  so  that  on  the  basis 
of  it,  “the  tendency  of  mankind  toward  the 
good”  could  be  explained,  once  and  for  all  time? 
Kant’s  answer:  “That  is  revolution.”  In- 

stinct at  fault  in  everything  and  anything,  in- 
stinct as  a revolt  against  nature,  German 
decadence  as  a philosophy — that  is  Kant! — 


55  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


12. 

I put  aside  a few  sceptics,  the  types  of  decency 
in  the  history  of  philosophy:  the  rest  haven’t 
the  slightest  conception  of  intellectual  integrity. 
They  behave  like  women,  all  these  great  en- 
thusiasts and  prodigies — they  regard  “beauti- 
ful feelings”  as  arguments,  the  “heaving 
breast”  as  the  bellows  of  divine  inspiration, 
conviction  as  the  criterion  of  truth.  In  the  end, 
with  “German”  innocence,  Kant  tried  to  give  a 
scientific  flavour  to  this  form  of  corruption,  this 
dearth  of  intellectual  conscience,  by  calling  it 
“practical  reason.”  He  deliberately  invented 
a variety  of  reasons  for  use  on  occasions  when  it 
was  desirable  not  to  trouble  with  reason — that 
is,  when  morality,  when  the  sublime  command 
“thou  shalt,”  was  heard.  When  one  recalls  the 
fact  that,  among  all  peoples,  the  philosopher 
is  no  more  than  a development  from  the  old  type 
of  priest,  this  inheritance  from  the  priest,  this 
fraud  upon  self,  ceases  to  be  remarkable. 
When  a man  feels  that  he  has  a divine  mission, 
say  to  lift  up,  to  save  or  to  liberate  mankind — 
when  a man  feels  the  divine  spark  in  his  heart 
and  believes  that  he  is  the  mouthpiece  of  super- 
— 56  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


natural  imperatives — when  such  a mission  in- 
flames him,  it  is  only  natural  that  he  should 
stand  beyond  all  merely  reasonable  standards  of 
judgment.  He  feels  that  he  is  himself  sancti- 
fied by  this  mission,  that  he  is  himself  a type 
of  a higher  order!  . . . What  has  a priest  to  do 
with  philosophy!  He  stands  far  above  it! — 
And  hitherto  the  priest  has  ruled! — He  has  de- 
termined the  meaning  of  “true”  and  “not 
true”!  . . . 

13. 

Let  us  not  under-estimate  this  fact:  that  we 
ourselves,  we  free  spirits,  are  already  a “trans- 
valuation of  all  values,”  a visualized  declara- 
tion of  war  and  victory  against  all  the  old  con- 
cepts of  “true”  and  “not  true.”  The  most 
valuable  intuitions  are  the  last  to  be  attained; 
the  most  valuable  of  all  are  those  which  deter- 
mine methods.  All  the  methods,  all  the  prin- 
ciples of  the  scientific  spirit  of  today,  were  the 
targets  for  thousands  of  years  of  the  most  pro- 
found contempt;  if  a man  inclined  to  them  he 
was  excluded  from  the  society  of  “decent” 
people — he  passed  as  “an  enemy  of  God,”  as 
a scoffer  at  the  truth,  as  one  “possessed.”  As 
— 57  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


a man  of  science,  he  belonged  to  the  Chandala/ 
. . . We  have  had  the  whole  pathetic  stupidity 
of  mankind  against  us — their  every  notion  of 
what  the  truth  ought  to  be,  of  what  the  service 
of  the  truth  ought  to  be — their  every  “thou 
shalt”  was  launched  against  us.  . . . Our  ob- 
jectives, our  methods,  our  quiet,  cautious,  dis- 
trustful manner — all  appeared  to  them  as  abso- 
lutely discreditable  and  contemptible. — Look- 
ing back,  one  may  almost  ask  one’s  self  with 
reason  if  it  was  not  actually  an  aesthetic  sense 
that  kept  men  blind  so  long:  what  they  de- 
manded of  the  truth  was  picturesque  effective- 
ness, and  of  the  learned  a strong  appeal  to  their 
senses.  It  was  our  modesty  that  stood  out  long- 
est against  their  taste.  . . . How  well  they 
guessed  that,  these  turkey-cocks  of  God! 

14. 

We  have  unlearned  something.  We  have  be- 
come more  modest  in  every  way.  We  no  longer 
derive  man  from  the  “spirit,”  from  the  “god- 
head”; we  have  dropped  him  back  among  the 
beasts.  We  regard  him  as  the  strongest  of  the 
beasts  because  he  is  the  craftiest;  one  of  the  re- 
^ The  lowest  of  the  Hindu  castes. 

— 58  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


suits  thereof  is  his  intellectuality.  On  the 
other  hand,  we  guard  ourselves  against  a con- 
ceit which  would  assert  itself  even  here:  that 
man  is  the  great  second  thought  in  the  process 
of  organic  evolution.  He  is,  in  truth,  anything 
but  the  crown  of  creation:  beside  him  stand 
many  other  animals,  all  at  similar  stages  of  de- 
velopment.  . . . And  even  when  we  say  that 
we  say  a bit  too  much,  for  man,  relatively 
speaking,  is  the  most  botched  of  all  the  animals 
and  the  sickliest,  and  he  has  wandered  the  most 
dangerously  from  his  instincts — though  for  all 
that,  to  be  sure,  he  remains  the  most  interesting! 
— As  regards  the  lower  animals,  it  was  Descartes 
who  first  had  the  really  admirable  daring  to  de- 
scribe them  as  machina;  the  whole  of  our  phy- 
siology is  directed  toward  proving  the  truth  of 
this  doctrine.  Moreover,  it  is  illogical  to  set 
man  apart,  as  Descartes  did:  what  we  know  of 
man  today  is  limited  precisely  by  the  extent  to 
which  we  have  regarded  him,  too,  as  a machine. 
Formerly  we  accorded  to  man,  as  his  inheritance 
from  some  higher  order  of  beings,  what  was 
called  “free  will”;  now  we  have  taken  even  tliis 
will  from  him,  for  the  term  no  longer  describes 
anything  that  we  can  understand.  The  old  word 
— 59  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


, “will”  now  connotes  only  a sort  of  result,  an 
individual  reaction,  that  follows  inevitably  upon 
a series  of  partly  discordant  and  partly  har- 
monious stimuli — the  will  no  longer  “acts,”  or 
“moves.”  . . . Formerly  it  was  thought  that 
man’s  consciousness,  his  “spirit,”  offered 
evidence  of  his  high  origin,  his  divinity.  That 
he  might  be  perfected,  he  was  advised,  tortoise- 
like, to  draw  his  senses  in,  to  have  no  traffic 
with  earthly  things,  to  shuffle  off  his  mortal  coil 
— then  only  tlie  important  part  of  him,  the  “pure 
spirit,”  would  remain.  Here  again  we  have 
thought  out  the  thing  better:  to  us  conscious- 
ness, or  “the  spirit,”  appears  as  a symptom  of 
a relative  imperfection  of  the  organism,  as  an 
experiment,  a groping,  a misunderstanding,  as 
an  affliction  which  uses  up  nervous  force  un- 
necessarily— we  deny  that  anything  can  be  done 
perfectly  so  long  as  it  is  done  consciously. 
The  “pure  spirit”  is  a piece  of  pure  stupidity: 
take  away  the  nervous  system  and  the  senses, 
the  so-called  “mortal  shell,”  and  the  rest  is  mis- 
calculation— that  is  all!  . . . 


— 60 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


15. 

Under  Christianity  neither  morality  nor  re- 
ligion has  any  point  of  contact  with  actuality. 
It  offers  purely  imaginary  causes  (“God” 
“soul,”  “ego,”  “spirit,”  “free  will” — or  even 
“unfree”),  and  purely  imaginary  effects  (“sin” 
“salvation”  “grace,”  “punishment,”  “forgive- 
ness of  sins”).  Intercourse  between  imaginary 
beings  (“God,”  “spirits,”  “souls”);  an  imagin- 
ary natural  history  (anthropocentric;  a total 
denial  of  the  concept  of  natural  causes) ; an 
imaginary  psychology  (misunderstandings  of 
self,  misinterpretations  of  agreeable  or  dis- 
agreeable general  feelings — for  example,  of  the 
states  of  the  nervus  sympathicus  with  the  help 
of  the  sign-language  of  religio-ethical  balder- 
dash— , “repentance,”  “pangs  of  conscience,” 
“temptation  by  the  devil,”  “the  presence  of 
God”) ; an  imaginary  teleology  (the  “kingdom 
of  God,”  “the  last  judgment,”  “eternal  life”). 
— This  purely  fictitious  world,  greatly  to  its  dis- 
advantage, is  to  be  differentiated  from  the  world 
of  dreams;  the  latter  at  least  reflects  reality, 
whereas  the  former  falsifies  it,  cheapens  it  and 
denies  it.  Once  the  concept  of  “nature”  had 
— 61  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


been  opposed  to  the  concept  of  “God,”  the  word 
“natural”  necessarily  took  on  the  meaning  of 
“abominable” — the  whole  of  that  fictitious 
world  has  its  sources  in  hatred  of  the  natural 
( — the  real! — ),  and  is  no  more  than  evidence 
of  a profound  uneasiness  in  the  presence  of 
reality.  . . . This  explains  everything.  Who 
alone  has  any  reason  for  living  his  way  out  of 
reality?  The  man  who  suffers  under  it.  But 
to  suffer  from  reality  one  must  be  a botched 
reality.  . . . The  preponderance  of  pains  over 
pleasures  is  the  cause  of  this  fictitious  morality 
and  religion:  but  such  a preponderance  also 
supplies  the  formula  for  decadence.  . . . 

16. 

A criticism  of  the  Christian  concept  of  God 
leads  inevitably  to  the  same  conclusion. — A na- 
tion that  still  believes  in  itself  holds  fast  to 
its  own  god.  In  him  it  does  honour  to  the 
conditions  which  enable  it  to  survive,  to  its 
virtues — it  projects  its  joy  in  itself,  its  feeling 
of  power,  into  a being  to  whom  one  may  offer 
thanks.  He  who  is  rich  will  give  of  his  riches; 
a proud  people  need  a god  to  whom  they  can 
make  sacrifices.  . . . Religion,  within  these 
— 62  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

limits,  is  a form  of  gratitude.  A man  is  grate- 
ful for  his  own  existence:  to  that  end  he  needs 
a god. — Such  a god  must  be  able  to  work  both 
benefits  and  injuries;  he  must  be  able  to  play 
either  friend  or  foe — he  is  wondered  at  for  the 
good  he  does  as  well  as  for  the  evil  he  does. 
But  the  castration,  against  all  nature,  of  such 
a god,  making  him  a god  of  goodness  alone, 
would  be  contrary  to  human  inclination.  Man- 
kind has  just  as  much  need  for  an  evil  god  as 
for  a good  god;  it  doesn’t  have  to  thank  mere 
tolerance  and  humanitarianism  for  its  own 
existence.  . . . What  would  be  the  value  of  a 
god  who  knew  nothing  of  anger,  revenge,  envy, 
scorn,  cunning,  violence?  who  had  perhaps 
never  experienced  the  rapturous  ardeurs  of 
victory  and  of  destruction?  No  one  would 
understand  such  a god:  why  should  any  one 
want  him? — True  enough,  when  a nation  is  on 
the  downward  path,  when  it  feels  its  belief  in 
its  own  future,  its  hope  of  freedom  slipping 
from  it,  when  it  begins  to  see  submission  as  a 
first  necessity  and  the  virtues  of  submission 
as  measures  of  self-preservation,  then  it  must 
overhaul  its  god.  He  then  becomes  a hypocrite, 
timorous  and  demure;  he  counsels  “peace  of 
— 63  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


soul,”  hate-no-more,  leniency,  “love”  of  friend 
and  foe.  He  moralizes  endlessly;  he  creeps 
into  every  private  virtue;  he  becomes  the  god 
of  every  man;  he  becomes  a private  citizen,  a 
cosmopolitan.  . . . Formerly  he  represented 
a people,  the  strength  of  a people,  everything 
aggressive  and  thirsty  for  power  in  the  soul  of  a 
people;  now  he  is  simply  the  good  god.  . . . 
The  truth  is  that  there  is  no  other  alternative 
for  gods:  either  they  are  the  will  to  power — in 
which  case  they  are  national  gods — or  in- 
capacity for  power — in  which  case  they  have 
to  be  good.  . . 


17. 

Wherever  the  will  to  power  begins  to  decline, 
in  whatever  form,  there  is  always  an  accom- 
panying decline  physiologically,  a decadence. 
The  divinity  of  this  decadence,  shorn  of  its 
masculine  virtues  and  passions,  is  converted 
perforce  into  a god  of  the  physiologically  de- 
graded, of  the  weak.  Of  course,  they  do  not 
call  themselves  the  weak;  they  call  themselves 
“the  good.”  . . . No  hint  is  needed  to  indicate 
the  moments  in  history  at  which  the  dualistic 
fiction  of  a good  and  an  evil  god  first  became 
— 64  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

possible.  The  same  instinct  which  prompts  the 
inferior  to  reduce  their  own  god  to  “goodness- 
in-itself”  also  prompts  them  to  eliminate  all 
good  qualities  from  the  god  of  their  superiors; 
they  make  revenge  on  their  masters  by  making 
a devil  of  the  latter’s  god. — The  good  god,  and 
the  devil  like  him — both  are  abortions  of 
decadence. — How  can  we  be  so  tolerant  of  the 
naivete  of  Christian  theologians  as  to  join  in 
their  doctrine  that  the  evolution  of  the  concept 
of  god  from  “the  god  of  Israel,”  the  god  of  a 
people,  to  the  Christian  god,  the  essence  of  all 
goodness,  is  to  be  described  as  progress? — But 
even  Renan  does  this.  As  if  Renan  had  a right 
to  be  naive!  The  contrary  actually  stares  one 
in  the  face.  When  everything  necessary  to 
ascending  life;  when  all  that  is  strong,  courage- 
ous, masterful  and  proud  has  been  eliminated 
from  the  concept  of  a god;  when  he  has  sunk 
step  by  step  to  the  level  of  a staff  for  the  weary, 
a sheet-anchor  for  the  drowning;  when  he  be- 
comes the  poor  man’s  god,  the  sinner’s  god,  the 
invalid’s  god  par  excellence,  and  the  attribute 
of  “saviour”  or  “redeemer”  remains  as  the  one 
essential  attribute  of  divinity — just  what  is  the 
significance  of  such  a metamorphosis?  what 
— 65  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


does  such  a reduction  of  the  godhead  imply? 
— To  be  sure,  the  “kingdom  of  God”  has  thus 
grown  larger.  Formerly  he  had  only  his  own 
people,  his  “chosen”  people.  But  since  then 
he  has  gone  wandering,  like  his  people  them- 
selves, into  foreign  parts;  he  has  given  up  set- 
tling down  quietly  anywhere;  finally  he  has 
come  to  feel  at  home  everywhere,  and  is  the 
great  cosmopolitan — until  now  he  has  the 
“great  majority”  on  his  side,  and  half  the 
earth.  But  this  god  of  the  “great  majority,” 
this  democrat  among  gods,  has  not  become  a 
proud  heathen  god:  on  the  contrary,  he  remains 
a Jew,  he  remains  a god  in  a comer,  a god  of 
all  the  dark  nooks  and  crevices,  of  all  the  noise- 
some  quarters  of  the  world!  . . . His  earthly 
kingdom,  now  as  always,  is  a kingdom  of  the 
underworld,  a souterrain  kingdom,  a ghetto 
kingdom.  . . . And  he  himself  is  so  pale,  so 
weak,  so  decadent.  . . . Even  the  palest  of 
the  pale  are  able  to  master  him — messieurs  the 
metaphysicians,  those  albinos  of  the  intellect. 
They  spun  their  webs  around  him  for  so  long  that 
finally  he  was  hypnotized,  and  began  to  spin 
himself,  and  became  another  metaphysician. 
Thereafter  he  resumed  once  more  his  old  busi- 
— 66  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


ness  of  spinning  the  world  out  of  his  inmost 
being  sub  specie  Spinozae;  thereafter  he  be- 
came ever  thinner  and  paler — became  the 
“ideal,”  became  “pure  spirit,”  became  “the 
absolute,”  became  “the  thing-in-itself.”  . . . 
The  collapse  of  a god:  he  became  a “thing-in- 
itself.” 


18. 


The  Christian  concept  of  a god — the  god  as 
the  patron  of  the  sick,  the  god  as  a spinner  of 
cobwebs,  the  god  as  a spirit — is  one  of  the  most 
corrupt  concepts  that  has  ever  been  set  up  in 
the  world:  it  probably  touches  low- water  mark 
in  the  ebbing  evolution  of  the  god-type.  God 
degenerated  into  the  contradiction  of  life.  In- 
stead of  being  its  transfiguration  and  eternal 
Yea!  In  him  war  is  declared  on  life,  on 
nature,  on  the  will  to  live!  God  becomes  the 
formula  for  every  slander  upon  the  “here  and 
now,”  and  for  every  lie  about  the  “beyond”! 
In  him  nothingness  is  deified,  and  the  will  to 
nothingness  is  made  holy!  . . . 


19. 

The  fact  that  the  strong  races  of  northern 
Europe  did  not  repudiate  this  Christian  god  does 
— 67  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


little  credit  to  their  gift  for  religion — and  not 
much  more  to  their  taste.  They  ought  to  have 
been  able  to  make  an  end  of  such  a moribund 
and  worn-out  product  of  the  decadence.  A 
curse  lies  upon  them  because  they  were  not  equal 
to  it;  they  made  illness,  decrepitude  and  contra- 
diction a part  of  their  instincts — and  since  then 
they  have  not  managed  to  create  any  more  gods. 
Two  thousand  years  have  come  and  gone — and 
not  a single  new  god ! Instead,  there  still  exists, 
and  as  if  by  some  intrinsic  right, — as  if  he  were 
the  ultimatum  and  maximum  of  the  power  to 
create  gods,  of  the  creator  spiritus  in  mankind 
— this  pitiful  god  of  Christian  monotono -theism! 
This  hybrid  image  of  decay,  conjured  up  out  of 
emptiness,  contradiction  and  vain  imagining,  in 
which  all  the  instincts  of  decadence,  - all  the 
cowardices  and  wearinesses  of  the  soul  find  their 
sanction  1 — 

20. 

In  my  condemnation  of  Christianity  I surely 
hope  I do  no  injustice  to  a related  religion  with 
an  even  larger  number  of  believers:  I allude 
to  Buddhism.  Both  are  to  be  reckoned  among 
the  nihilistic  religions — they  are  both  decadence 
— 68  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

religions — ^but  they  are  separated  from  each 
other  in  a very  remarkable  way.  For  the  fact 
that  he  is  able  to  compare  them  at  all  the  critic 
of  Christianity  is  indebted  to  the  scholars  of 
India. — Buddhism  is  a hundred  times  as  real- 
istic as  Christianity — it  is  part  of  its  living 
heritage  that  it  is  able  to  face  problems  ob- 
jectively and  coolly;  it  is  the  product  of  long 
centuries  of  philosohical  speculation.  The 
concept,  “god,”  was  already  disposed  of  before 
it  appeared.  Buddhism  is  the  only  genuinely 
positive  religion  to  be  encountered  in  history, 
and  this  applies  even  to  its  epistemology  (which 
is  a strict  phenomenalism).  It  does  not  speak 
of  a “struggle  with  sin,”  but,  yielding  to  reality, 
of  the  “struggle  with  suffering.”  Sharply  dif- 
ferentiating itself  from  Christianity,  it  puts  the 
self-deception  that  lies  in  moral  concepts  be- 
hind it;  it  is,  in  my  phrase,  beyond  good  and 
evil. — The  two  physiological  facts  upon  which 
it  grounds  itself  and  upon  which  it  bestows  its 
chief  attention  are:  first,  an  excessive  sensitive- 
ness to  sensation,  which  manifests  itself  as  a 
refined  susceptibility  to  pain,  and  secondly,  an 
extraordinary  spirituality,  a too  protracted  con- 
cern with  concepts  and  logical  procedures,  under 
— 69  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

the  influence  of  which  the  instinct  of  personality 
has  yielded  to  a notion  of  the  “impersonal.” 
( — Both  of  these  states  will  be  familiar  to  a few 
of  my  readers,  the  objectivists,  by  experience, 
as  they  are  to  me).  These  physiological  states 
produced  a depression,  and  Buddha  tried  to 
combat  it  by  hygienic  measures.  Against  it  he 
prescribed  a life  in  the  open,  a life  of  travel; 
moderation  in  eating  and  a careful  selection  of 
foods;  caution  in  the  use  of  intoxicants;  the 
same  caution  in  arousing  any  of  the  passions 
that  foster  a bilious  habit  and  heat  the  blood; 
finally,  no  worry,  either  on  one’s  own  account 
or  on  account  of  others.  He  encourages  ideas 
that  make  for  either  quiet  contentment  or  good 
cheer — he  finds  means  to  combat  ideas  of  other 
sorts.  He  understands  good,  the  state  of  good- 
ness, as  something  which  promotes  health. 
Prayer  is  not  included,  and  neither  is  asceticism. 
There  is  no  categorical  imperative  nor  any  dis- 
ciplines, even  within  the  walls  of  a monastery 
( — it  is  always  possible  to  leave — ).  These 
things  would  have  been  simply  means  of  in- 
creasing the  excessive  sensitiveness  above  men- 
tioned. For  the  same  reason  he  does  not  advo- 
cate any  conflict  with  unbelievers;  his  teaehing 
— 70  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


is  antagonistic  to  nothing  so  much  as  to  revenge, 
aversion,  ressentiment  ( — “enmity  never  brings 
an  end  to  enmity”:  the  moving  refrain  of  all 
Buddhism.  . . .)  And  in  all  this  he  was  right, 
for  it  is  precisely  these  passions  which,  in  view 
of  his  main  regiminal  purpose,  are  unhealthful. 
The  mental  fatigue  that  he  observes,  already 
plainly  displayed  in  too  much  “objectivity” 
(that  is,  in  the  individual’s  loss  of  interest  in 
himself,  in  loss  of  balance  and  of  “egoism”), 
he  combats  by  strong  efforts  to  lead  even  the 
spiritual  interests  back  to  the  ego.  In  Buddha’s 
teaching  egoism  is  a duty.  The  “one  thing 
needful,”  the  question  “how  can  you  be  de- 
livered from  suffering,”  regulates  and  deter- 
mines the  whole  spiritual  diet.  ( — Perhaps 
one  will  here  recall  that  Athenian  who  also 
declared  war  upon  pure  “scientiflcality,”  to 
wit,  Socrates,  who  also  elevated  egoism  to  the 
estate  of  a morality). 


21. 

The  things  necessary  to  Buddhism  are  a very 
mild  climate,  customs  of  great  gentleness  and 
liberality,  and  no  militarism;  moreover,  it  must 
get  its  start  among  the  higher  and  better  edu- 
— 71  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


cated  classes.  Cheerfulness,  quiet  and  the  ab- 
sence of  desire  are  the  chief  desiderata,  and  they 
are  attained.  Buddhism  is  not  a religion  in 
which  perfection  is  merely  an  object  of  aspira- 
tion: perfection  is  actually  normal. — 

Under  Christianity  the  instincts  of  the  sub- 
jugated and  the  oppressed  come  to  the  fore:  it 
is  only  those  who  are  at  the  bottom  who  seek 
their  salvation  in  it.  Here  the  prevailing  pas- 
time, the  favourite  remedy  for  boredom  is  the 
discussion  of  sin,  self-criticism,  the  inquisition 
of  conscience;  here  the  emotion  produced  by 
power  (called  “God”)  is  pumped  up  (by 
prayer) ; here  the  highest  good  is  regarded  as 
unattainable,  as  a gift,  as  “grace.”  Here,  too, 
open  dealing  is  lacking;  concealment  and  the 
darkened  room  are  Christian.  Here  body  is 
despised  and  hygiene  is  denounced  as  sensual; 
the  church  even  ranges  itself  against  cleanliness 
( — the  first  Christian  order  after  the  banishment 
of  the  Moors  elosed  the  public  baths,  of  which 
there  were  270  in  Cordova  alone).  Christian, 
too,  is  a certain  cruelty  toward  one’s  self  and 
toward  others;  hatred  of  unbelievers;  the  will 
to  persecute.  Sombre  and  disquieting  ideas  are 
in  the  foreground;  the  most  esteemed  states  of 
— 72  — 


THE  A N T ICH  RI  ST 


mind,  bearing  the  most  respectable  names,  are 
epileptoid;  the  diet  is  so  regulated  as  to  en- 
gender morbid  symptoms  and  over-stimulate  the 
nerves.  Qiristian,  again,  is  all  deadly  enmity 
to  the  rulers  of  the  earth,  to  the  “aristocratic” 
— along  with  a sort  of  secret  rivalry  with  them 
( — one  resigns  one’s  “body”  to  them;  one  wants 
only  one’s  “soul”  . . . ) . And  Christian  is  all 
hatred  of  the  intellect,  of  pride,  of  courage,  of 
freedom,  of  intellectual  libertinage;  Christian 
is  all  hatred  of  the  senses,  of  joy  in  the  senses, 
of  joy  in  general.  . . . 

22. 

When  Christianity  departed  from  its  native 
soil,  that  of  the  lowest  orders,  the  underworld 
of  the  ancient  world,  and  began  seeking  power 
among  barbarian  peoples,  it  no  longer  had  to 
deal  with  exhausted  men,  but  with  men  still  in- 
wardly savage  and  capable  of  self-torture — in 
brief,  strong  men,  but  bungled  men.  Here,  un- 
like in  the  case  of  the  Buddhists,  the  cause  of 
discontent  with  self,  suffering  through  self,  is 
not  merely  a general  sensitiveness  and  suscepti- 
bility to  pain,  but,  on  the  contrary,  an  inordinate 
thirst  for  inflicting  pain  on  others,  a tendency 
— 73  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


to  obtain  subjective  satisfaction  in  hostile  deeds 
and  ideas.  Christianity  had  to  embrace  bar- 
baric concepts  and  valuations  in  order  to  obtain 
mastery  over  barbarians:  of  such  sort,  for  ex- 
ample, are  the  sacrifices  of  the  first-born,  the 
drinking  of  blood  as  a sacrament,  the  disdain 
of  the  intellect  and  of  culture;  torture  in  all  its 
forms,  whether  bodily  or  not;  the  whole  pomp  of 
the  cult.  Buddhism  is  a religion  for  peoples 
in  a further  state  of  development,  for  races  that 
have  become  kind,  gentle  and  over-spiritualized 
( — Europe  is  not  yet  ripe  for  it — ) : it  is  a 
summons  that  takes  them  back  to  peace  and 
cheerfulness,  to  a careful  rationing  of  the  spirit, 
to  a certain  hardening  of  the  body.  Christi- 
anity aims  at  mastering  beasts  of  prey;  its  modus 
operandi  is  to  make  them  ill — to  make  feeble 
is  the  Christian  recipe  for  taming,  for  “civiliz- 
ing” Buddhism  is  a religion  for  the  closing, 
over-wearied  stages  of  civilization.  Christi- 
anity appears  before  civilization  has  so  much  as 
begun — under  certain  circumstances  it  lays  the 
very  foundations  thereof. 


74 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


23. 

Buddhism,  I repeat,  is  a himdred  times  more 
austere,  more  honest,  more  objective.  It  no 
longer  has  to  justify  its  pains,  its  susceptibility 
to  suffering,  by  interpreting  these  things  in 
terms  of  sin — it  simply  says,  as  it  simply  thinks, 
“I  suffer.”  To  the  barbarian,  however,  suffer- 
ing in  itself  is  scarcely  understandable:  what 
he  needs,  first  of  all,  is  an  explanation  as  to  why 
he  suffers.  (His  mere  instinct  prompts  him  to 
deny  his  suffering  altogether,  or  to  endure  it  in 
silence.)  Here  the  word  “devil”  was  a bless- 
ing: man  had  to  have  an  omnipotent  and  terrible 
enemy — there  was  no  need  to  be  ashamed  of  suf- 
fering at  the  hands  of  such  an  enemy. — 

At  the  bottom  of  Christianity  there  are  several 
subtleties  that  belong  to  the  Orient.  In  the  first 
place,  it  knows  that  it  is  of  very  little  conse- 
quence whether  a thing  be  true  or  not,  so  long 
as  it  is  believed  to  be  true.  Truth  and  faith: 
here  we  have  two  wholly  distinct  worlds  of  ideas, 
almost  two  diametrically  opposite  worlds — the 
road  to  the  one  and  the  road  to  the  other  lie  miles 
apart.  To  understand  that  fact  thoroughly — 
this  is  almost  enough,  in  the  Orient,  to  make  one 
— 75  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


a sage.  The  Brahmins  knew  it,  Plato  knew  it, 
every  student  of  the  esoteric  knows  it.  When, 
for  example,  a man  gets  any  pleasure  out  of  the 
notion  that  he  has  been  saved  from  sin,  it  is 
not  necessary  for  him  to  be  actually  sinful,  but 
merely  to  feel  sinful.  But  when  faith  is  thus 
exalted  above  everything  else,  it  necessarily  fol- 
lows that  reason,  knowledge  and  patient  inquiry 
have  to  be  discredited:  the  road  to  the  truth 
becomes  a forbidden  road. — Hope,  in  its 
stronger  forms,  is  a great  deal  more  powerful 
Stimulans  to  life  than  any  sort  of  realized  joy 
can  ever  be.  Man  must  be  sustained  in  suffer- 
ing by  a hope  so  high  that  no  conflict  with  actu- 
ality can  dash  it — so  high,  indeed,  that  no  ful- 
filment can  satisfy  it:  a hope  reaching  out  be- 
yond this  world.  (Precisely  because  of  this 
power  that  hope  has  of  making  the  suffering 
hold  out,  the  Greeks  regarded  it  as  the  evil  of 
evils,  as  the  most  malign  of  evils;  it  remained 
behind  at  the  source  of  all  evil.)^ — In  order 
that  love  may  be  possible,  God  must  become  a 
person;  in  order  that  the  lower  instincts  may 
take  a hand  in  the  matter  God  must  be  young. 
To  satisfy  the  ardor  of  the  woman  a beautiful 

1 That  is,  in  Pandora’s  box. 

— 76  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


saint  must  appear  on  the  scene,  and  to  satisfy 
that  of  the  men  there  must  be  a virgin.  These 
things  are  necessary  if  Christianity  is  to  assume 
lordship  over  a soil  on  which  some  aphrodisiacal 
or  Adonis  cult  has  already  established  a notion 
as  to  what  a cult  ought  to  be.  To  insist  upon 
chastity  greatly  strengthens  the  vehemence  and 
subjectivity  of  the  religious  instinct — it  makes 
the  cult  warmer,  more  enthusiastic,  more  soul- 
ful.— Love  is  the  state  in  which  man  sees  things 
most  decidedly  as  they  are  not.  The  force  of 
illusion  reaches  its  highest  here,  and  so  does  the 
capacity  for  sweetening,  for  transfiguring. 
When  a man  is  in  love  he  endures  more  than  at 
any  other  time;  he  submits  to  anything.  The 
problem  was  to  devise  a religion  which  would 
allow  one  to  love:  by  this  means  the  worst  that 
life  has  to  offer  is  overcome — it  is  scarcely  even 
noticed. — So  much  for  the  three  Christian  vir- 
tues: faith,  hope  and  charity:  I call  them  the 
three  Christian  ingenuities. — Buddhism  is  in  too 
late  a stage  of  development,  too  full  of  posi- 
tivism, to  be  shrewd  in  any  such  way. — 


— 77  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


24. 

Here  I barely  touch  upon  the  problem  of  the 
origin  of  Christianity.  The  first  thing  neces- 
sary to  its  solution  is  this:  that  Christianity  is 
to  be  understood  only  by  examining  the  soil 
from  which  it  sprung — it  is  not  a reaction  against 
Jewish  instincts;  it  is  their  inevitable  product; 
it  is  simply  one  more  step  in  the  awe-inspiring 
logic  of  the  Jews.  In  the  words  of  the 
Saviour,  “salvation  is  of  the  Jews.”  ^ — The 
second  thing  to  remember  is  this:  that  the  psy- 
chological type  of  the  Galilean  is  still  to  be 
recognized,  but  it  was  only  in  its  most  degen- 
erate form  (which  is  at  once  maimed  and  over- 
laden with  foreign  features)  that  it  could  serve 
in  the  manner  in  which  it  has  been  used:  as  a 
type  of  the  Saviour  of  mankind. — 

The  Jews  are  the  most  remarkable  people  in 
the  history  of  the  world,  for  when  they  were  con- 
fronted with  the  question,  to  be  or  not  to  be, 
they  chose,  with  perfectly  unearthly  delibera- 
tion, to  be  at  any  price:  this  price  involved  a 
radical  falsification  of  all  nature,  of  all  natural- 
ness, of  all  reality,  of  the  whole  inner  world, 
1 John  iv,  22. 


78 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


as  well  as  of  the  outer.  They  put  themselves 
against  all  those  conditions  under  which,  hither- 
to, a people  had  been  able  to  live,  or  had  even 
been  permitted  to  live;  out  of  themselves  they 
evolved  an  idea  which  stood  in  direct  opposi- 
tion to  natural  conditions — one  by  one  they 
distorted  religion,  civilization,  morality,  history 
and  psychology  until  each  became  a contradic- 
tion of  its  natural  significance.  We  meet  with 
the  same  phenomenon  later  on,  in  an  incalculably 
exaggerated  form,  but  only  as  a copy:  the  Chris- 
tian church,  put  beside  the  “people  of  God,” 
shows  a complete  lack  of  any  claim  to  origin- 
ality. Precisely  for  this  reason  the  Jews  are 
the  most  fateful  people  in  the  history  of  the 
world:  their  influence  has  so  falsified  the  reason- 
ing of  mankind  in  this  matter  that  today  the 
Christian  can  cherish  anti-Semitism  without 
realizing  that  it  is  no  more  than  the  final  conse- 
quence of  Judaism. 

In  my  “Genealogy  of  Morals”  I give  the  first 
psychological  explanation  of  the  concepts  under- 
lying those  two  antithetical  things,  a noble 
morality  and  a ressentiment  morality,  the 
second  of  which  is  a mere  product  of  the  denial 
of  the  former.  The  Judaeo-Christian  moral 
— 79  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

system  belongs  to  the  second  division,  and  in 
every  detail.  In  order  to  be  able  to  say  Nay 
to  everything  representing  an  ascending  evolu- 
tion of  life — that  is,  to  well-being,  to  power,  to 
beauty,  to  self-approval — the  instincts  of  res- 
sentiment,  here  become  downright  genius,  had 
to  invent  an  other  world  in  which  the  ac- 
ceptance of  life  appeared  as  the  most  evil 
and  abominable  thing  imaginable.  Psychologi- 
cally, the  Jews  are  a people  gifted  with  the 
very  strongest  vitality,  so  much  so  that 
when  they  found  themselves  facing  impos- 
sible conditions  of  life  they  chose  volun- 
tarily, and  with  a profound  talent  for  self-preser- 
vation, the  side  of  all  those  instincts  which  make 
for  decadence — not  as  if  mastered  by  them,  but 
as  if  detecting  in  them  a power  by  which  “the 
world”  could  be  defied.  The  Jews  are  the  very 
opposite  of  decadents:  they  have  simply  been 
forced  into  appearing  in  that  guise,  and  with  a 
degree  of  skill  approaching  the  non  plus  ultra 
of  histrionic  genius  they  have  managed  to  put 
themselves  at  the  head  of  all  decadent  move- 
ments ( — for  example,  the  Christianity  of 
Paul — ),  and  so  make  of  them  something 
stronger  than  any  party  frankly  saying  Yes  to 
— 80  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


life.  To  the  sort  of  men  who  reach  out  for 
power  under  Judaism  and  Christianity, — that  is 
to  say,  to  the  priestly  class — decadence  is  no 
more  than  a means  to  an  end.  Men  of  this  sort 
have  a vital  interest  in  making  mankind  sick, 
and  in  confusing  the  values  of  “good”  and 
“bad,”  “true”  and  “false”  in  a manner  that  is 
not  only  dangerous  to  life,  but  also  slanders  it. 

25. 

The  history  of  Israel  is  invaluable  as  a 
typical  history  of  an  attempt  to  denaturize  all 
natural  values:  I point  to  five  facts  which  bear 

this  out.  Originally,  and  above  all  in  the  time 
of  the  monarchy,  Israel  maintained  the  right 
attitude  of  things,  which  is  to  say,  the  natural 
attitude.  Its  Jahveh  was  an  expression  of  its 
consciousness  of  power,  its  joy  in  itself,  its 
hopes  for  itself:  to  him  the  Jews  looked  for  vic- 
tory and  salvation  and  through  him  they  ex- 
pected nature  to  give  them  whatever  was  neces- 
sary to  their  existence — above  all,  rain.  Jahveh 
is  the  god  of  Israel,  and  consequently  the  god  of 
justice:  this  is  the  logic  of  every  race  that  has 
power  in  its  hands  and  a good  conscience  in  the 
use  of  it.  In  the  religious  ceremonial  of  the 
— 81  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

Jews  both  aspects  of  this  self -approval  stand 
revealed.  The  nation  is  grateful  for  the  high 
destiny  that  has  enabled  it  to  obtain  dominion; 
it  is  grateful  for  the  benign  procession  of  the 
seasons,  and  for  the  good  fortune  attending  its 
herds  and  its  crops. — This  view  of  things  re- 
mained an  ideal  for  a long  while,  even  after  it 
had  been  robbed  of  validity  by  tragic  blows: 
anarchy  within  and  the  Assyrian  without.  But 
the  people  still  retained,  as  a projection  of  their 
highest  yearnings,  that  vision  of  a king  who  was 
at  once  a gallant  warrior  and  an  upright  judge 
— a vision  best  visualized  in  the  typical  prophet 
(i.  e.,  critic  and  satirist  of  the  moment),  Isaiah. 
— But  every  hope  remained  unfulfilled.  The 
old  god  no  longer  could  do  what  he  used  to  do. 
He  ought  to  have  been  abandoned.  But  what 
actually  happened?  Simply  this:  the  concep- 
tion of  him  was  changed — the  conception  of  him 
was  denaturized;  this  was  the  price  that  had  to 
be  paid  for  keeping  him. — Jahveh,  the  god  of 
“justice” — he  is  in  accord  with  Israel  no  more, 
he  no  longer  vizualizes  the  national  egoism;  he 
is  now  a god  only  conditionally.  . . . The  pub- 
lic notion  of  this  god  now  becomes  merely  a 
— 82  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

weapon  in  the  hands  of  clerical  agitators,  who 
interpret  all  happiness  as  a reward  and  all  un- 
happiness as  a punishment  for  obedience  or  dis- 
obedience to  him,  for  “sin”:  that  most  fraudulent 
of  all  imaginable  interpretations,  whereby  a 
“moral  order  of  the  world”  is  set  up,  and  the 
fundamental  concepts,  “cause”  and  “effect,” 
are  stood  on  their  heads.  Once  natural  causa- 
tion has  been  swept  out  of  the  world  by  doctrines 
of  reward  and  punishment  some  sort  of  un- 
natural  causation  becomes  necessary:  and  all 
other  varieties  of  the  denial  of  nature  follow  it. 
A god  who  demands — in  place  of  a god  who 
helps,  who  gives  counsel,  who  is  at  bottom 
merely  a name  for  every  happy  inspiration  of 
courage  and  self-reliance.  . . . Morality  is  no 
longer  a reflection  of  the  conditions  which  make 
for  the  sound  life  and  development  of  the  peo- 
ple; it  is  no  longer  the  primary  life-instinct; 
instead  it  has  become  abstract  and  in  opposi- 
tion to  life — a fundamental  perversion  of  the 
fancy,  an  “evil  eye”  on  all  things.  What  is 
Jewish,  what  is  Christian  morality?  Chance 
robbed  of  its  innocence;  unhappiness  polluted 
with  the  idea  of  “sin”;  well-being  represented 
— 83  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


as  a danger,  as  a “temptation”;  a physiological 
disorder  produced  by  the  canker  worm  of  con- 
science. . . . 

26. 

The  concept  of  god  falsified;  the  concept  of 
morality  falsified; — but  even  here  Jewish  priest- 
craft did  not  stop.  The  whole  history  of  Israel 
ceased  to  be  of  any  value:  out  with  it! — These 
priests  accomplished  that  miracle  of  falsification 
of  which  a great  part  of  the  Bible  is  the  docu- 
mentary evidence ; with  a degree  of  contempt  un- 
paralleled, and  in  the  face  of  all  tradition  and 
all  historical  reality,  they  translated  the  past  of 
their  people  into  religious  terms,  which  is  to 
say,  they  converted  it  into  an  idiotic  mechanism 
of  salvation,  whereby  all  offences  against  Jahveh 
were  punished  and  all  devotion  to  him  was  re- 
warded. We  would  regard  this  act  of  histor- 
ical falsification  as  something  far  more  shame- 
ful if  familiarity  with  the  ecclesiastical  inter- 
pretation of  history  for  thousands  of  years  had 
not  blunted  our  inclinations  for  uprightness  in 
historicis.  And  the  philosophers  support  the 
church:  the  lie  about  a “moral  order  of  the 
world”  runs  through  the  whole  of  philosophy, 
— 84  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

even  the  newest.  What  is  the  meaning  of  a 
“moral  order  of  the  world”?  That  there  is  a 
thing  called  the  will  of  God  which,  once  and 
for  all  time,  determines  what  man  ought  to  do 
and  what  he  ought  not  to  do;  that  the  worth  of 
a people,  or  of  an  individual  thereof,  is  to  be 
measured  by  the  extent  to  which  they  or  he 
obey  this  will  of  God;  that  the  destinies  of  a 
people  or  of  an  individual  are  controlled  by  this 
will  of  God,  which  rewards  or  punishes  accord- 
ing to  the  degree  of  obedience  manifested. — In 
place  of  all  that  pitiable  lie  reality  has  this  to 
say:  the  priest,  a parasitical  variety  of  man  who 
can  exist  only  at  the  cost  of  every  sound  view 
of  life,  takes  the  name  of  God  in  vain:  he  calls 
that  state  of  human  society  in  which  he  himself 
determines  the  value  of  all  things  “the  kingdom 
of  God”;  he  calls  the  means  whereby  that  state 
of  affairs  is  attained  “the  will  of  God”;  with 
cold-blooded  cynicism  he  estimates  all  peoples, 
all  ages  and  all  individuals  by  the  extent  of  their 
subservience  or  opposition  to  the  power  of  the 
priestly  order.  One  observes  him  at  work:  un- 
der the  hand  of  the  Jewish  priesthood  the  great 
age  of  Israel  became  an  age  of  decline;  the 
Exile,  with  its  long  series  of  misfortunes,  was 
— 85  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

transformed  into  a punishment  for  that  great 
age — during  which  priests  had  not  yet  come  into 
existence.  Out  of  the  powerful  and  wholly  free 
heroes  of  Israel’s  history  they  fashioned,  accord- 
ing to  their  changing  needs,  either  wretched 
bigots  and  hypocrites  or  men  entirely  “godless.” 
They  reduced  every  great  event  to  the  idiotic 
formula:  “obedient  or  disobedient  to  God.” — 
They  went  a step  further:  the  “will  of  God” 
(in  other  words  some  means  necessary  for  pre- 
serving the  power  of  the  priests)  had  to  be 
determined — and  to  this  end  they  had  to  have 
a “revelation.”  In  plain  English,  a gigantic 
literary  fraud  had  to  be  perpetrated,  and  “holy 
scriptures”  had  to  be  concocted — and  so,  with 
the  utmost  hierarchical  pomp,  and  days  of  pen- 
ance and  much  lamentation  over  the  long  days 
of  “sin”  now  ended,  they  were  duly  published. 
The  “will  of  God,”  it  appears,  had  long  stood 
like  a rock;  the  trouble  was  that  mankind  had 
neglected  the  “holy  scriptures”.  . . . But  the 
“will  of  God”  had  already  been  revealed  to 
Moses.  . . . What  happened?  Simply  this: 
the  priest  had  formulated,  once  and  for  all  time 
and  with  the  strictest  meticulousness,  what  tithes 
were  to  be  paid  to  him,  from  the  largest  to  the 
— 86  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


smallest  ( — not  forgetting  the  most  appetizing 
cuts  of  meat,  for  the  priest  is  a great  consumer 
of  beefsteaks) ; in  brief,  he  let  it  be  known  just 
what  he  wanted,  what  “the  will  of  God”  was.  . . . 
From  this  time  forward  things  were  so  arranged 
that  the  priest  became  indispensable  every- 
where; at  all  the  great  natural  events  of  life,  at 
birth,  at  marriage,  in  sickness,  at  death,  not  to 
say  at  the  “sacrifice”  (that  is,  at  meal-times), 
the  holy  parasite  put  in  his  appearance,  and 
proceeded  to  denaturize  it — in  his  own  phrase, 
to  “sanctify”  it.  ...  For  this  should  be  noted: 
that  every  natural  habit,  every  natural  institu- 
tion (the  state,  the  administration  of  justice, 
marriage,  the  care  of  the  sick  and  of  the  poor), 
everything  demanded  by  the  life-instinct,  in 
short,  everything  that  has  any  value  in  itself, 
is  reduced  to  absolute  worthlessness  and  even 
made  the  reverse  of  valuable  by  the  parasitism 
of  priests  (or,  if  you  chose,  by  the  “moral  order 
of  the  world”).  The  fact  requires  a sanction 
— a power  to  grant  values  becomes  necessary, 
and  the  only  way  it  can  create  such  values  is  by 
denying  nature.  . . . The  priest  depreciates  and 
desecrates  nature:  it  is  only  at  this  price  that  he 
can  exist  at  all. — Disobedience  to  God,  which 
— 87  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


actually  means  to  the  priest,  to  “the  law,”  now 
gets  the  name  of  “sin”;  the  means  prescribed 
for  “reconciliation  with  God”  are,  of  course, 
precisely  the  means  which  bring  one  most  effec- 
tively under  the  thumb  of  the  priest;  he  alone 
can  “save”.  . . . Psychologically  considered, 
“sins”  are  indispensable  to  every  society  organ- 
ized on  an  ecclesiastical  basis;  they  are  the  only 
reliable  weapons  of  power;  the  priest  lives  upon 
sins;  it  is  necessary  to  him  that  there  be  “sin- 
ning”. . . . Prime  axiom:  “God  forgiveth 

him  that  repenteth” — in  plain  English,  him  that 
submitteth  to  the  priest. 

27. 

Christianity  sprang  from  a soil  so  corrupt 
that  on  it  everything  natural,  every  natural 
value,  every  reality  was  opposed  by  the  deepest 
instincts  of  the  ruling  class — it  grew  up  as  a sort 
of  war  to  the  death  upon  reality,  and  as  such 
it  has  never  been  surpassed.  The  “holy  peo- 
ple,” who  had  adopted  priestly  values  and 
priestly  names  for  all  things,  and  who,  with  a 
terrible  logical  consistency,  had  rejected  every- 
thing of  the  earth  as  “unholy,”  “worldly,”  “sin- 
ful”— this  people  put  its  instinct  into  a final  for- 
— 88  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


mula  that  was  logical  to  the  point  of  self-annihi- 
lation : as  Christianity  it  actually  denied  even  the 
last  form  of  reality,  the  “holy  people,”  the 
“chosen  people,”  Jewish  reality  itself.  The 
phenomenon  is  of  the  first  order  of  importance: 
the  small  insurrectionary  movement  which  took 
the  name  of  Jesus  of  Nazareth  is  simply  the 
Jewish  instinct  redivivus — in  other  words,  it  is 
the  priestly  instinct  come  to  such  a pass  that  it 
can  no  longer  endure  the  priest  as  a fact;  it  is 
the  discovery  of  a state  of  existence  even  more 
fantastic  than  any  before  it,  of  a vision  of  life 
even  more  unreal  than  that  necessary  to  an 
ecclesiastical  organization.  Christianity  actu- 
ally denies  the  church.  . . . 

I am  unable  to  determine  what  was  the  target 
of  the  insurrection  said  to  have  been  led 
(whether  rightly  or  wrongly)  by  Jesus,  if  it  was 
not  the  Jewish  church — “church”  being  here 
used  in  exactly  the  same  sense  that  the  word  has 
today.  It  was  an  insurrection  against  the 
“good  and  just,”  against  the  “prophets  of 
Israel,”  against  the  whole  hierarchy  of  society — 
not  against  corruption,  but  against  caste,  privi- 
lege, order,  formalism.  It  was  unbelief  in 
“superior  men,”  a Nay  flung  at  everything 
— 89  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

that  priests  and  theologians  stood  for.  But 
the  hierarchy  that  was  called  into  ques- 
tion, if  only  for  an  instant,  by  this  move- 
ment was  the  structure  of  piles  which, 
above  everything,  was  necessary  to  the  safety 
of  the  Jewish  people  in  the  midst  of  the 
“waters” — it  represented  their  last  possibility  of 
survival;  it  was  the  final  residuum  of  their  inde- 
pendent political  existence;  an  attack  upon  it 
was  an  attack  upon  the  most  profound  national 
instinct,  the  most  powerful  national  will  to  live, 
that  has  ever  appeared  on  earth.  This  saintly 
anarchist,  who  aroused  the  people  of  the  abyss, 
the  outcasts  and  “sinners,”  the  Chandala  of 
Judaism,  to  rise  in  revolt  against  the  established 
order  of  things — and  in  language  which,  if  the 
Gospels  are  to  be  credited,  would  get  him  sent 
to  Siberia  today — this  man  was  certainly  a 
political  criminal,  at  least  in  so  far  as  it  was 
possible  to  be  one  in  so  absurdly  unpolitical  a 
community.  This  is  what  brought  him  to  the 
cross:  the  proof  thereof  is  to  be  found  in  the  in- 
scription that  was  put  upon  the  cross.  He  died 
for  his  own  sins — ^there  is  not  the  slightest 
ground  for  believing,  no  matter  how  often  it  is 
asserted,  that  he  died  for  the  sins  of  others. — 
— 90  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


28. 

As  to  whether  he  himself  was  conscious  of  this 
contradiction — whether,  in  fact,  this  was  the 
only  contradiction  he  was  eognizant  of — that 
is  quite  another  question.  Here,  for  the  first 
time,  I touch  upon  the  problem  of  the  psychol- 
ogy of  the  Saviour. — I confess,  to  begin  with, 
that  there  are  very  few  books  which  offer  me 
harder  reading  than  the  Gospels.  My  difficul- 
ties are  quite  different  from  those  which  en- 
abled the  learned  curiosity  of  the  German  mind 
to  achieve  one  of  its  most  unforgettable  tri- 
umphs. It  is  a long  while  since  I,  like  all  other 
young  scholars,  enjoyed  with  all  the  sapient 
laboriousness  of  a fastidious  philologist  the 
work  of  the  incomparable  Strauss.^  At  that 
time  I was  twenty  years  old:  now  I am  too 
serious  for  that  sort  of  thing.  What  do  I care 
for  the  contradictions  of  “tradition”?  How 
can  any  one  call  pious  legends  “traditions”? 
The  histories  of  saints  present  the  most  dubious 
variety  of  literature  in  existence;  to  examine 
them  by  the  scientific  method,  in  the  entire  ab- 

^ David  Friedrich  Strauss  (1808-74),  author  of  “Das  Leben 
Jesu”  (1835-6),  a very  famous  work  in  its  day.  Nietzsche 
here  refers  to  it. 


— 91  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

sence  of  corroborative  documents,  seems  to  me 
to  condemn  the  whole  inquiry  from  the  start — 
it  is  simply  learned  idling.  . . . 

29. 

What  concerns  me  is  the  psychological  type 
of  the  Saviour.  This  type  might  he  depicted 
in  the  Gospels,  in  however  mutilated*  a form 
and  however  much  overladen  with  extraneous 
characters — that  is,  in  spite  of  the  Gospels;  just 
as  the  figure  of  Francis  of  Assisi  shows  itself  in 
his  legends  in  spite  of  his  legends.  It  is  not  a 
question  of  mere  truthful  evidence  as  to  what 
he  did,  what  he  said  and  how  he  actually  died; 
the  question  is,  whether  his  type  is  still  con- 
ceivable, whether  it  has  been  handed  down  to 
us. — All  the  attempts  that  I know  of  to  read 
the  history  of  a “soul”  in  the  Gospels  seem  to 
me  to  reveal  only  a lamentable  psychological 
levity.  M.  Renan,  that  mountebank  in  psycho- 
logicus,  has  contributed  the  two  most  unseemly 
notions  to  this  business  of  explaining  the  type  of 
Jesus:  the  notion  of  the  genius  and  that  of  the 
hero  (“heros” ) . But  if  there  is  anything  essen- 
tially unevangelical,  it  is  surely  the  concept  of 
the  hero.  What  the  Gospels  make  instinctive 
— 92  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

is  precisely  the  reverse  of  all  heroic  struggle, 
of  all  taste  for  conflict:  the  very  incapacity  for 
resistance  is  here  converted  into  something 
moral:  (“resist  not  evil!” — the  most  profound 
sentence  in  the  Gospels,  perhaps  the  true  key 
to  them),  to  wit,  the  blessedness  of  peace,  of 
gentleness,  the  inability  to  be  an  enemy.  What 
is  the  meaning  of  “glad  tidings”? — The  true 
life,  the  life  eternal  has  been  found — it  is  not 
merely  promised,  it  is  here,  it  is  in  you;  it  is 
the  life  that  lies  in  love  free  from  all  retreats 
and  exclusions,  from  all  keeping  of  distances. 
Every  one  is  the  child  of  God — Jesus  claims 
nothing  for  himself  alone — as  the  child  of  God 
each  man  is  the  equal  of  every  other  man.  . . . 
Imagine  making  Jesus  a hero! — And  what  a tre- 
mendous misunderstanding  appears  in  the  word 
“genius”!  Our  whole  conception  of  the 
“spiritual,”  the  whole  conception  of  our  civili- 
zation, could  have  had  no  meaning  in  the  world 
that  Jesus  lived  in.  In  the  strict  sense  of  the 
physiologist,  a quite  different  word  ought  to  be 
used  here.  . . .We  all  know  that  there  is  a 
morbid  sensibility  of  the  tactile  nerves  which 
causes  those  suffering  from  it  to  recoil  from 
every  touch,  and  from  every  effort  to  grasp  a 
— 93  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


solid  object.  Brought  to  its  logical  conclusion, 
such  a physiological  habitus  becomes  an  instinc- 
tive hatred  of  all  reality,  a flight  into  the  “in- 
tangible,” into  the  “incomprehensible”;  a dis- 
taste for  all  formulae,  for  all  conceptions  of  time 
and  space,  for  everything  established — customs, 
institutions,  the  church — ; a feeling  of  being  at 
home  in  a world  in  which  no  sort  of  reality  sur- 
vives, a merely  “inner”  world,  a “true”  world, 
an  “eternal”  world.  . . . “The  Kingdom  of 
God  is  within  you”.  . . . 

30. 

The  instinctive  hatred  of  reality:  the  conse- 
quence of  an  extreme  susceptibility  to  pain  and 
irritation — so  great  that  merely  to  be  “touched” 
becomes  unendurable,  for  every  sensation  is  too 
profound. 

The  instinctive  exclusion  of  all  aversion,  all 
hostility,  all  bounds  and  distances  in  feeling: 
the  consequence  of  an  extreme  susceptibility 
to  pain  and  irritation — so  great  that  it  senses 
all  resistance,  all  compulsion  to  resistance,  as 
unbearable  anguish  ( — that  is  to  say,  as  harm- 
ful, as  prohibited  by  the  instinct  of  self-preserva- 
tion), and  regards  blessedness  (joy)  as  possible 
— 94  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


only  when  it  is  no  longer  necessary  to  offer  re- 
sistance to  anybody  or  anything,  however  evil  or 
dangerous — love,  as  the  only,  as  the  ultimate 
possibility  of  life.  . . . 

These  are  the  two  physiological  realities  upon 
and  out  of  which  the  doctrine  of  salvation  has 
sprung.  I call  them  a sublime  super-develop- 
ment of  hedonism  upon  a thoroughly  unsalu- 
brious  soil.  What  stands  most  closely  related  to 
them,  though  with  a large  admixture  of  Greek 
vitality  and  nerve-force,  is  epicureanism,  the 
theory  of  salvation  of  paganism.  Epicurus  was 
a typical  decadent:  I was  the  first  to  recognize 

him. — The  fear  of  pain,  even  of  infinitely 
slight  pain — the  end  of  this  can  be  nothing  save 
a religion  of  love.  . . . 

31. 

I have  already  given  my  answer  to  the  prob- 
lem. The  prerequisite  to  it  is  the  assumption 
that  the  type  of  the  Saviour  has  reached  us  only 
in  a greatly  distorted  form.  This  distortion  is 
very  probable:  there  are  many  reasons  why  a 
type  of  that  sort  should  not  be  handed  down 
in  a pure  form,  complete  and  free  of  additions. 
The  milieu  in  which  this  strange  figure  moved 
— 95  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

must  have  left  marks  upon  him,  and  more  must 
have  been  imprinted  by  the  history,  the  destiny, 
of  the  early  Christian  communities;  the  latter 
indeed,  must  have  embellished  the  type  retros- 
pectively with  characters  which  can  be  imder- 
stood  only  as  serving  the  purposes  of  war  and 
of  propaganda.  That  strange  and  sickly  world 
into  which  the  Gospels  lead  us — a world  ap- 
parently out  of  a Russian  novel,  in  which  the 
scum  of  society,  nervous  maladies  and  “childish” 
idiocy  keep  a tryst — must,  in  any  case,  have 
coarsened  the  type:  the  first  disciples,  in  par- 
ticular, must  have  been  forced  to  translate  an 
existence  visible  only  in  symbols  and  incompre- 
hensibilities into  their  own  crudity,  in  order  to 
understand  it  at  all — in  their  sight  the  type  could 
take  on  reality  only  after  it  had  been  recast  in 
a familiar  mould.  . . . The  prophet,  the  messiah, 
the  future  judge,  the  teacher  of  morals,  the 
worker  of  wonders,  John  the  Baptist — all  these 
merely  presented  chances  to  misunderstand  it. 
. . . Finally,  let  us  not  underrate  the  proprium 
of  all  great,  and  especially  all  sectarian  venera- 
tion: it  tends  to  erase  from  the  venerated  ob- 
jects all  its  original  traits  and  idiosyncrasies, 
often  so  painfully  strange — it  does  not  even  see 
— 96  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

them.  It  is  greatly  to  be  regretted  that  no 
Dostoyevsky  lived  in  the  neighbourhood  of  this 
most  interesting  decadent — I mean  some  one  who 
would  have  felt  the  poignant  charm  of  such  a 
compound  of  the  sublime,  the  morbid  and  the 
childish.  In  the  last  analysis,  the  type,  as  a 
type  of  the  decadence,  may  actually  have  been 
peculiarly  complex  and  contradictory:  such  a 
possibility  is  not  to  be  lost  sight  of.  Neverthe- 
less, the  probabilities  seem  to  be  against  it,  for 
in  that  case  tradition  would  have  been  particu- 
larly accurate  and  objective,  whereas  we  have 
reasons  for  assuming  the  contrary.  Meanwhile, 
there  is  a contradiction  between  the  peaceful 
preacher  of  the  mount,  the  sea-shore  and  the 
fields,  who  appears  like  a new  Buddha  on  a 
soil  very  unlike  India’s,  and  the  aggressive  fan- 
atic, the  mortal  enemy  of  theologians  and  ec- 
clesiastics, who  stands  glorified  by  Renan’s 
malice  as  “le  grand  maitre  en  ironie.”  I my- 
self haven’t  any  doubt  that  the  greater  part  of 
this  venom  (and  no  less  of  esprit)  got  itself  into 
the  concept  of  the  Master  only  as  a result  of  the 
excited  nature  of  Christian  propaganda:  we  all 
know  the  unserupulousness  of  sectarians  when 
they  set  out  to  turn  their  leader  into  an  apologia 
— 97  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


for  themselves.  When  the  early  Christians  had 
need  of  an  adroit,  contentious,  pugnacious  and 
maliciously  subtle  theologian  to  tackle  other 
theologians,  they  created  a “god”  that  met  that 
need,  just  as  they  put  into  his  mouth  without 
hesitation  certain  ideas  that  were  necessary  to 
them  but  that  were  utterly  at  odds  with  the 
Gospels — “the  second  coming,”  “the  last  judg- 
ment,” all  sorts  of  expectations  and  promises, 
current  at  the  time. — 


32. 

I can  only  repeat  that  I set  myself  against  all 
efforts  to  intrude  the  fanatic  into  the  figure  of 
the  Saviour:  the  very  word  imperieux,  used  by 
Renan,  is  alone  enough  to  annul  the  type.  What 
the  “glad  tidings”  tell  us  is  simply  that  there 
are  no  more  contradictions;  the  kingdom  of 
heaven  belongs  to  children;  the  faith  that  is 
voiced  here  is  no  more  an  embattled  faith — it 
is  at  hand,  it  has  been  from  the  beginning,  it  is 
a sort  of  recrudescent  childishness  of  the  spirit. 
The  physiologists,  at  all  events,  are  familiar  with 
such  a delayed  and  incomplete  puberty  in  the 
living  organism,  the  result  of  degeneration.  A 
faith  of  this  sort  is  not  furious,  it  does  not  de- 
— 98  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


nounce,  it  does  not  defend  itself:  it  does  not 
come  with  “the  sword” — it  does  not  realize  how 
it  will  one  day  set  man  against  man.  It  does 
not  manifest  itself  either  by  miracles,  or  by  re- 
wards and  promises,  or  by  “scriptures”:  it  is 
itself,  first  and  last,  its  own  miracle,  its  own  re- 
ward, its  own  promise,  its  own  “kingdom  of 
God.”  This  faith  does  not  formulate  itself — 
it  simply  lives,  and  so  guards  itself  against 
formulae.  To  be  sure,  the  accident  of  environ- 
ment, of  educational  background  gives  promi- 
nence to  concepts  of  a certain  sort:  in  primitive 
Christianity  one  finds  only  concepts  of  a Judaeo- 
Semitic  character  ( — that  of  eating  and  drink- 
ing at  the  last  supper  belongs  to  this  category 
— an  idea  which,  like  everything  else  Jewish, 
has  been  badly  mauled  by  the  church).  But 
let  us  be  careful  not  to  see  in  all  this  anything 
more  than  symbolical  language,  semantics  ^ an 
opportunity  to  speak  in  parables.  It  is  only  on 
the  theory  that  no  work  is  to  be  taken  literally 
that  this  anti-realist  is  able  to  speak  at  all.  Set 
down  among  Hindus  he  would  have  made  use  of 
the  concepts  of  Sankhya,^  and  among  Chinese 

1 The  word  Semiotik  is  in  the  text,  but  it  is  probable  that 
Semantik  is  what  Nietzsche  had  in  mind. 

2 One  of  the  six  great  systems  of  Hindu  philosophy. 

— 99  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


he  would  have  employed  those  of  Lao-tse  ^ — and 
in  neither  case  would  it  have  made  any  dif- 
ference to  him. — With  a little  freedom  in  the 
use  of  words,  one  might  actually  call  Jesus  a 
“free  spirit”  ^ — he  cares  nothing  for  what  is 
established:  the  word  killeth^  whatever  is 
established  killeth.  The  idea  of  “life”  as  an 
experience,  as  he  alone  conceives  it,  stands  op- 
posed to  his  mind  to  every  sort  of  word,  formula, 
law,  belief  and  dogma.  He  speaks  only  of 
inner  things:  “life”  or  “truth”  or  “light”  is  his 
word  for  the  innermost — in  his  sight  everything 
else,  the  whole  of  reality,  all  nature,  even  lan- 
guage, has  significance  only  as  sign,  as  allegory. 
— Here  it  is  of  paramount  importance  to  be  led 
into  no  error  by  the  temptations  lying  in  Chris- 
tian, or  rather  ecclesiastical  prejudices:  such  a 
symbolism  par  excellence  stands  outside  all  re- 
ligion, all  notions  of  worship,  all  history,  all 
natural  science,  all  worldly  experience,  all 
knowledge,  all  politics,  all  psychology,  all 
books,  all  art — ^his  “wisdom”  is  precisely  a pure 


1 The  reputed  founder  of  Taoism. 

2 Nietzsche’s  name  for  one  accepting  his  own  philosophy. 

3 That  is,  the  strict  letter  of  the  law — the  chief  target  of 
Jesus’s  early  preaching. 


100 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


ignorance  ^ of  all  such  things.  He  has  never 
heard  of  culture;  he  doesn’t  have  to  make  war 
on  it — he  doesn’t  even  deny  it.  . . . The  same 
thing  may  be  said  of  the  state,  of  the  whole 
bourgeoise  social  order,  of  labour,  of  war — ^he 
has  no  ground  for  denying  “ the  world,”  for  he 
knows  nothing  of  the  ecclesiastical  concept  of 
“the  world”.  . . . Denial  is  precisely  the  thing 
that  is  impossible  to  him. — In  the  same  way  he 
lacks  argumentative  capacity,  and  has  no  belief 
that  an  article  of  faith,  a “truth,”  may  be  estab- 
lished by  proofs  ( — his  proofs  are  inner 
“lights,”  subjective  sensations  of  happiness  and 
self-approval,  simple  “proofs  of  power” — ). 
Such  a doctrine  cannot  contradict:  it  doesn’t 
know  that  other  doctrines  exist,  or  can  exist,  and 
is  wholly  incapable  of  imagining  anything  op- 
posed to  it.  . . . If  anything  of  the  sort  is  ever 
encountered,  it  laments  the  “blindness”  with  sin- 
cere sympathy — for  it  alone  has  “light” — but  it 
does  not  offer  objections.  . . . 

33. 

In  the  whole  psychology  of  the  “Gospels”  the 
concepts  of  guilt  and  punishment  are  lacking, 

1 A reference  to  the  “pure  ignorance”  (reine  Thorheit)  of 
Parsifal. 


— 101  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


and  so  is  that  of  reward,  “Sin,”  which  means 
anything  that  puts  a distance  between  God  and 
man,  is  abolished — this  is  precisely  the  “glad 
tidings”  Eternal  bliss  is  not  merely  promised, 
nor  is  it  bound  up  with  conditions:  it  is  con- 
ceived as  the  only  reality — what  remains  con- 
sists merely  of  signs  useful  in  speaking  of  it. 

The  results  of  such  a point  of  view  project 
themselves  into  a new  way  of  life,  the  special 
evangelical  way  of  life.  It  is  not  a “belief”  that 
marks  off  the  Christian;  he  is  distinguished  by  a 
different  mode  of  action;  he  acts  differently. 
He  offers  no  resistance,  either  by  word  or  in  his 
heart,  to  those  who  stand  against  him.  He 
draws  no  distinction  between  strangers  and  coun- 
trymen, Jews  and  Gentiles  (“neighbour,”  of 
course,  means  fellow-believer,  Jew),  He  is  an- 
gry with  no  one,  and  he  despises  no  one.  He 
neither  appeals  to  the  courts  of  justice  nor  heeds 
their  mandates  (“Swear  not  at  all”)  He  never 
under  any  circumstances  divorces  his  wife,  even 
when  he  has  proofs  of  her  infidelity, — And  un- 
der all  of  this  is  one  principle;  all  of  it  arises 
from  one  instinct, — 

The  life  of  the  Saviour  was  simply  a carrying 
^ Matthew  v,  34. 


102  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


out  of  this  way  of  life — and  so  was  his  death. 
. . . He  no  longer  needed  any  formula  or  rit- 
ual in  his  relations  with  God — not  even  prayer. 
He  had  rejected  the  whole  of  the  Jewish  doctrine 
of  repentance  and  atonement ; he  knew  that  it  was 
only  by  a way  of  life  that  one  could  feel  one’s 
self  “divine,”  “blessed,”  “evangelical,”  a “child 
of  God.”  Not  by  “repentance,”  not  by  “prayer 
and  forgiveness”  is  the  way  to  God:  only  the 
Gospel  way  leads  to  God — it  is  itself  “God!” — 
What  the  Gospels  abolished  was  the  Judaism  in 
the  concepts  of  “sin,”  “forgiveness  of  sin,” 
“faith,”  “salvation  through  faith” — the  whole 
ecclesiastical  dogma  of  the  Jews  was  denied  by 
the  “glad  tidings.” 

The  deep  instinct  which  prompts  the  Christian 
how  to  live  so  that  he  will  feel  that  he  is  “in 
heaven”  and  is  “immortal,”  despite  many  rea- 
sons for  feeling  that  he  is  not  “in  heaven”:  this 
is  the  only  psychological  reality  in  “salvation.” 
— A new  way  of  life,  not  a new  faith,  . . . 

34. 

If  I understand  anything  at  all  about  this 
great  symbolist,  it  is  this : that  he  regarded  only 
subjective  realities  as  realities,  as  “truths” — 
— 103  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

that  he  saw  everything  else,  everything  natural, 
temporal,  spatial  and  historical,  merely  as  signs, 
as  materials  for  parables.  The  concept  of  “the 
Son  of  God”  does  not  connote  a concrete  person 
in  history,  an  isolated  and  definite  individual, 
but  an  “eternal”  fact,  a psychological  symbol  set 
free  from  the  concept  of  time.  The  same  thing 
is  true,  and  in  the  highest  sense,  of  the  God  of 
this  typical  symbolist,  of  the  “kingdom  of  God,” 
and  of  the  “sonship  of  God.”  Nothing  could 
be  more  un-Christian  than  the  crude  ecclesiasti- 
cal notions  of  God  as  a person,  of  a “kingdom 
of  God”  that  is  to  come,  of  a “kingdom  of 
heaven”  beyond,  and  of  a “son  of  God”  as  the 
second  person  of  the  Trinity.  All  this — if  I 
may  be  forgiven  the  phrase — is  like  thrusting 
one’s  fist  into  the  eye  ( and  what  an  eye ! ) of  the 
Gospels:  a disrespect  for  symbols  amounting  to 
world-historical  cynicism.  . . . But  it  is  never- 
theless obvious  enough  what  is  meant  by  the  sym- 
bols “Father”  and  “Son” — not,  of  course,  to 
every  one — : the  word  “Son”  expresses  en- 
trance into  the  feeling  that  there  is  a general 
transformation  of  all  things  (beatitude),  and 
“Father”  expresses  that  feeling  itself — the  sen- 
sation of  eternity  and  of  perfection. — I am 
— 104  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


ashamed  to  remind  you  of  what  the  church  has 
made  of  this  symbolism ; has  it  not  set  an  Amphi- 
tryon story  ^ at  the  threshold  of  the  Christian 
“faith”?  And  a dogma  of  “immaculate  con- 
ception” for  good  measure?  ...  And  thereby 
it  has  robbed  conception  of  its  immaculate- 
ness— 

The  “kingdom  of  heaven”  is  a state  of  the 
heart — not  something  to  come  “beyond  the 
world”  or  “after  death.”  The  whole  idea  of 
natural  death  is  absent  from  the  Gospels:  death 
is  not  a bridge,  not  a passing ; it  is  absent  because 
it  belongs  to  a quite  different,  a merely  apparent 
world,  useful  only  as  a symbol.  The  “hour 
of  death”  is  not  a Christian  idea — “hours,” 
time,  the  physical  life  and  its  crises  have  no  ex- 
istence for  the  bearer  of  “glad  tidings.”  . . . 
The  “kingdom  of  God”  is  not  something  that  men 
wait  for:  it  had  no  yesterday  and  no  day  after 
tomorrow,  it  is  not  going  to  come  at  a “mil- 
lennium”— it  is  an  experience  of  the  heart,  it  is 
everywhere  and  it  is  nowhere.  . . . 

1 Amphytrion  was  the  son  of  Alcaeus,  King  of  Tiryns.  His 
wife  was  Alcmene.  During  his  absence  she  was  visited  by 
Zeus,  and  bore  Heracles. 


105  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


35. 

This  “bearer  of  glad  tidings”  died  as  he 
lived  and  taught — not  to  “save  mankind,”  but 
to  show  mankind  how  to  live.  It  was  a way  of 
life  that  he  bequeathed  to  man:  his  demeanour 
before  the  judges,  before  the  officers,  before  his 
accusers — his  demeanour  on  the  cross.  He 
does  not  resist;  he  does  not  defend  his  rights; 
he  makes  no  effort  to  ward  off  the  most  extreme 
penalty — more,  he  invites  it.  . . . And  he 
prays,  suffers  and  loves  with  those,  in  those,  who 
do  him  evil.  . . . Not  to  defend  one’s  self,  not 
to  show  anger,  not  to  lay  blames.  . . . On  the 
contrary,  to  submit  even  to  the  Evil  One — to  love 
him.  . . . 


36. 

— ^We  free  spirits — we  are  the  first  to  have  the 
necessary  prerequisite  to  understanding  what 
nineteen  centuries  have  misunderstood — that  in- 
stinct and  passion  for  integrity  which  makes  war 
upon  the  “holy  lie”  even  more  than  upon  all 
other  lies.  . . . Mankind  was  unspeakably  far 
from  our  benevolent  and  cautious  neutrality, 
from  that  discipline  of  the  spirit  which  alone 
— 106  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


makes  possible  the  solution  of  sueh  strange  and 
subtle  things:  what  men  always  sought,  with 
shameless  egoism,  was  their  own  advantage 
therein;  they  created  the  church  out  of  denial  of 
the  Gospels.  . . . 

Whoever  sought  for  signs  of  an  ironical  divin- 
ity’s hand  in  the  great  drama  of  existence  would 
find  no  small  indication  thereof  in  the  stupen- 
dous question-mark  that  is  called  Christianity. 
That  mankind  should  be  on  its  knees  before  the 
very  antithesis  of  what  was  the  origin,  the  mean- 
ing and  the  law  of  the  Gospels — that  in  the  con- 
cept of  the  “church”  the  very  things  should  be 
pronounced  holy  that  the  “bearer  of  glad  tid- 
ings” regards  as  beneath  him  and  behind  him — 
it  would  be  impossible  to  surpass  this  as  a grand 
example  of  world-historical  irony — 

37. 

— Our  age  is  proud  of  its  historical  sense: 
how,  then,  could  it  delude  itself  into  believing 
that  the  crude  fable  of  the  wonder-worker  and 
Saviour  constituted  the  beginnings  of  Christian- 
ity— and  that  everything  spiritual  and  symboli- 
cal in  it  only  came  later?  Quite  to  the  contrary, 
the  whole  history  of  Christianity — from  the 
— 107  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


death  on  the  cross  onward — is  the  history  of  a 
progressively  clumsier  misunderstanding  of  an 
original  symbolism.  With  every  extension  of 
Christianity  among  larger  and  ruder  masses, 
even  less  capable  of  grasping  the  principles  that 
gave  birth  to  it,  the  need  arose  to  make  it  more 
and  more  vulgar  and  barbarous — it  absorbed  the 
teachings  and  rites  of  all  the  subterranean  cults 
of  the  imperium  Romanum,  and  the  absurdities 
engendered  by  all  sorts  of  sickly  reasoning.  It 
was  the  fate  of  Christianity  that  its  faith  had 
to  become  as  sickly,  as  low  and  as  vulgar  as  the 
needs  were  sickly,  low  and  vulgar  to  which  it  had 
to  administer.  A sickly  barbarism  finally  lifts 
itself  to  power  as  the  church — the  church,  that 
incarnation  of  deadly  hostility  to  all  honesty, 
to  all  loftiness  of  soul,  to  all  discipline  of  the 
spirit,  to  all  spontaneous  and  kindly  humanity. 
— Christian  values — noble  values:  it  is  only  we, 
we  free  spirits,  who  have  re-established  this 
greatest  of  all  antitheses  in  values!  . . . 

38. 

— I cannot,  at  this  place,  avoid  a sigh.  There 
are  days  when  I am  visited  by  a feeling  blacker 
than  the  blackest  melancholy — contempt  of  man. 

— 108  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


Let  me  leave  no  doubt  as  to  what  I despise,  whom 
I despise:  it  is  the  man  of  today,  the  man  with 
whom  I am  unhappily  contemporaneous.  The 
man  of  today — I am  suffocated  by  his  foul 
breath!  . . . Toward  the  past,  like  all  who 
understand,  I am  full  of  tolerance,  which  is  to 
say,  generous  self-control:  with  gloomy  caution 
I pass  through  whole  millenniums  of  this  mad- 
house of  a world,  call  it  “Christianity,” 
“Christian  faith”  or  the  “Christian  church,”  as 
you  will — I take  care  not  to  hold  mankind  re- 
sponsible for  its  lunacies.  But  my  feeling 
changes  and  breaks  out  irresistibly  the  moment  I 
enter  modem  times,  our  times.  Our  age  knows 
better.  . . . What  was  formerly  merely  sickly 
now  becomes  indecent — it  is  indecent  to  be  a 
Christian  today.  And  here  my  disgust  begins. 
— I look  about  me:  not  a word  survives  of 
what  was  once  called  “tmth”;  we  can  no 
longer  bear  to  hear  a priest  pronounce  the 
word.  Even  a man  who  makes  the  most 
modest  pretensions  to  integrity  must  know  that  a 
theologian,  a priest,  a pope  of  today  not  only 
errs  when  he  speaks,  but  actually  lies — and  that 
he  no  longer  escapes  blame  for  his  lie  through 
“innocence”  or  “ignorance.”  The  priest  knows, 
— 109  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

as  every  one  knows,  that  there  is  no  longer  any 
“God,”  or  any  “sinner,”  or  any  “Saviour” — that 
“free  will”  and  the  “moral  order  of  the  world” 
are  lies — : serious  reflection,  the  profound  self- 
conquest  of  the  spirit,  allow  no  man  to  pretend 
that  he  does  not  know  it.  . . .All  the  ideas  of 
the  church  are  now  recognized  for  what  they  are 
— as  the  worst  counterfeits  in  existence,  invented 
to  debase  nature  and  all  natural  values;  the 
priest  himself  is  seen  as  he  actually  is — as  the 
most  dangerous  form  of  parasite,  as  the  veno- 
mous spider  of  ereation.  . . . We  know,  our 
conscience  now  knows — ^just  what  the  real  value 
of  all  those  sinister  inventions  of  priest  and 
church  has  been  and  what  ends  they  have  served, 
with  their  debasement  of  humanity  to  a state  of 
self-pollution,  the  very  sight  of  which  excites 
loathing, — the  concepts  “the  other  world,”  “the 
last  judgment,”  “the  immortality  of  the  soul,” 
the  “soul”  itself : they  are  all  merely  so  many  in- 
struments of  torture,  systems  of  cruelty,  whereby 
the  priest  becomes  master  and  remains  master. 
. . . Every  one  knows  this,  but  nevertheless 
things  remain  as  before.  What  has  beeome  of 
the  last  trace  of  decent  feeling,  of  self-respect, 
when  our  statesmen,  otherwise  an  unconventional 
— 110  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


class  of  men  and  thoroughly  anti-Christian  in 
their  acts,  now  call  themselves  Christians  and  go 
to  the  communion-table?  ...  A prince  at  the 
head  of  his  armies,  magnificent  as  the  expres- 
sion of  the  egoism  and  arrogance  of  his  people 
— and  yet  acknowledging,  without  any  shame, 
that  he  is  a Christian!  . . . Whom,  then,  does 
Christianity  deny?  what  does  it  call  “the 
world”?  To  be  a soldier,  to  be  a judge,  to  be 
a patriot;  to  defend  one’s  self;  to  be  careful  of 
one’s  honour;  to  desire  one’s  own  advantage; 
to  be  proud  . . . every  act  of  everyday,  every 
instinct,  every  valuation  that  shows  itself  in  a 
deed,  is  now  anti-Christian:  what  a monster  of 
falsehood  the  modem  man  must  be  to  call  him- 
self nevertheless,  and  without  shame,  a Chris- 
tian!— 


39. 

— I shall  go  back  a bit,  and  tell  you  the 
authentic  history  of  Christianity. — The  very 
word  “Christianity”  is  a misunderstanding — at 
bottom  there  was  only  one  Christian,  and  he  died 
on  the  cross.  The  “Gospels”  died  on  the  cross. 
What,  from  that  moment  onward,  was  called 
the  “Gospels”  was  the  very  reverse  of 
— 111  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


what  he  had  lived:  “bad  tidings,”  a Dysange- 
lium.^  It  is  an  error  amounting  to  nonsensi- 
eality  to  see  in  “faith,”  and  particularly  in 
faith  in  salvation  through  Christ,  the  distinguish- 
ing mark  of  the  Christian:  only  the  Christian 
way  of  life,  the  life  lived  by  him  who  died  on 
the  cross,  is  Christian.  ...  To  this  day  such  a 
life  is  still  possible,  and  for  certain  men  even 
necessary:  genuine,  primitive  Christianity  will 
remain  possible  in  all  ages.  . . . Not  faith,  but 
acts;  above  all,  an  avoidance  of  acts,  a different 
state  of  being.  . . . States  of  consciousness, 
faith  of  a sort,  the  acceptance,  for  example,  of 
anything  as  true — as  every  psychologist  knows, 
the  value  of  these  things  is  perfectly  indifferent 
and  fifth-rate  compared  to  that  of  the  instincts: 
strictly  speaking,  the  whole  concept  of  intellec- 
tual causality  is  false.  To  reduce  being  a 
Christian,  the  state  of  Christianity,  to  an  accept- 
ance of  truth,  to  a mere  phenomenon  of  con- 
sciousness, is  to  formulate  the  negation  of 
Christianity.  In  fact,  there  are  no  Christians. 
The  “Christian” — he  who  for  two  thousand  years 
has  passed  as  a Christian — is  simply  a psycho- 

1 So  in  the  text.  One  of  Nietzsche’s  numerous  coinages,  ob- 
viously suggested  by  Evangelium,  the  German  for  gospel. 

— 112  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

logical  self-delusion.  Closely  examined,  it  ap- 
pears that,  despite  all  his  “faith,”  he  has  been 
ruled  only  by  his  instincts — and  what  instincts! 
— In  all  ages — for  example,  in  the  case  of 
Luther — “faith”  has  been  no  more  than  a cloak, 
a pretense,  a curtain  behind  which  the  instincts 
have  played  their  game — a shrewd  blindness  to 
the  domination  of  certain  of  the  instincts.  . . . 
I have  already  called  “faith”  the  specially 
Christian  form  of  shrewdness — people  always 
talk  of  their  “faith”  and  act  according  to  their 
instincts.  ...  In  the  world  of  ideas  of  the 
Christian  there  is  nothing  that  so  much  as 
touches  reality:  on  the  contrary,  one  recognizes 
an  instinctive  hatred  of  reality  as  the  motive 
power,  the  only  motive  power  at  the  bottom 
of  Christianity.  What  follows  therefrom? 
That  even  here,  in  psychologicis,  there  is 
a radical  error,  which  is  to  say  one  con- 
ditioning fundamentals,  which  is  to  say,  one 
in  substance.  Take  away  one  idea  and  put 
a genuine  reality  in  its  place — and  the  whole  of 
Christianity  crumbles  to  nothingness! — Viewed 
calmly,  this  strangest  of  all  phenomena,  a re- 
ligion not  only  depending  on  errors,  but  inven- 
tive and  ingenious  only  in  devising  injurious 
— 113  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


errors,  poisonous  to  life  and  to  the  heart — this  re- 
mains a spectacle  for  the  gods — for  those  gods 
who  are  also  philosophers,  and  whom  I have 
encountered,  for  example,  in  the  celebrated 
dialogues  at  Naxos.  At  the  moment  when  their 
disgust  leaves  them  ( — and  us!)  they  will  be 
thankful  for  the  spectacle  afforded  by  the  Chris- 
tians: perhaps  because  of  this  curious  exhibi- 
tion alone  the  wretched  little  planet  called  the 
earth  deserves  a glance  from  omnipotence,  a 
show  of  divine  interest.  . . . Therefore,  let  us 
not  underestimate  the  Christians:  the  Christian, 
false  to  the  point  of  innocence,  is  far  above  the 
ape — in  its  application  to  the  Christians  a well- 
known  theory  of  descent  becomes  a mere  piece 
of  politeness.  . . . 

40. 

— The  fate  of  the  Gospels  was  decided  by 
death — it  hung  on  the  “cross.”  ...  It  was  only 
death,  that  unexpected  and  shameful  death;  it 
was  only  the  cross,  which  was  usually  re- 
served for  the  canaille  only — it  was  only  this  ap- 
palling paradox  which  brought  the  disciples 
face  to  face  with  the  real  riddle:  “Who 
was  it?  what  was  it?” — The  feeling  of  dis- 
— 114  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

may,  of  profound  affront  and  injury;  the 
suspicion  that  such  a death  might  involve 
a refutation  of  their  cause ; the  terrible 
question,  “Why  just  in  this  way?” — this  state 
of  mind  is  only  too  easy  to  understand.  Here 
everything  must  be  accounted  for  as  necessary; 
everything  must  have  a meaning,  a reason,  the 
highest  sort  of  reason;  the  love  of  a disciple 
excludes  all  chance.  Only  then  did  the  chasm 
of  doubt  yawn:  “Who  put  him  to  death?  who 

was  his  natural  enemy?” — this  question  flashed 
like  a lightning-stroke.  Answer:  dominant  Juda- 
ism, its  ruling  class.  From  that  moment,  one 
found  one’s  self  in  revolt  against  the  established 
order,  and  began  to  understand  Jesus  as  in  re- 
volt against  the  established  order.  Until  then 
this  militant,  this  nay-saying,  nay-doing  element 
in  his  character  had  been  lacking;  what  is  more, 
he  had  appeared  to  present  its  opposite.  Ob- 
viously, the  little  community  had  not  understood 
what  was  precisely  the  most  important  thing  of 
all:  the  example  offered  by  this  way  of  dying,  the 
freedom  from  and  superiority  to  every  feeling 
of  ressentiment — a plain  indication  of  how  little 
he  was  understood  at  all!  All  that  Jesus  could 
hope  to  accomplish  by  his  death,  in  itself,  was 
— 115  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

to  offer  tile  strongest  possible  proof,  or  example, 
of  his  teachings  in  the  most  public  manner.  . . . 
But  his  disciples  were  very  far  from  forgiving 
his  death — though  to  have  done  so  would  have 
accorded  with  the  Gospels  in  the  highest  degree; 
and  neither  were  they  prepared  to  offer  them- 
selves, with  gentle  and  serene  calmness  of  heart, 
for  a similar  death.  . . . On  the  contrary,  it  was 
precisely  the  most  unevangelical  of  feelings,  re- 
venge, that  now  possessed  them.  It  seemed  im- 
possible that  the  cause  should  perish  with  his 
death:  “recompense”  and  “judgment”  became 
necessary  ( — yet  what  could  be  less  evangelical 
than  “recompense,”  “punishment,”  and  “sitting 
in  judgment”!).  Once  more  the  popular  belief 
in  the  coming  of  a messiah  appeared  in  the  fore- 
ground ; attention  was  rivetted  upon  an  historical 
moment:  the  “kingdom  of  God”  is  to  come,  with 
judgment  upon  his  enemies.  . . . But  in  all  this 
there  was  a wholesale  misunderstanding:  imagine 
the  “kingdom  of  God”  as  a last  act,  as  a mere 
promise!  The  Gospels  had  been,  in  fact,  the  in- 
carnation, the  fulfilment,  the  realization  of  this 
“kingdom  of  God.”  It  v/as  only  now  that  all 
the  familiar  contempt  for  and  bitterness  against 
Pharisees  and  theologians  began  to  appear  in 
^116  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


the  character  of  the  Master — he  was  thereby 
turned  into  a Pharisee  and  theologian  himself! 
On  the  other  hand,  the  savage  veneration  of 
these  completely  unbalanced  souls  could  no 
longer  endure  the  Gospel  doctrine,  taught  by 
Jesus,  of  the  equal  right  of  all  men  to  be  children 
of  God:  their  revenge  took  the  form  of  elevating 
Jesus  in  an  extravagant  fashion,  and  thus  sepa- 
rating him  from  themselves:  just  as,  in  earlier 
times,  the  Jews,  to  revenge  themselves  upon  their 
enemies,  separated  themselves  from  their  God, 
and  placed  him  on  a great  height.  The  One  God 
and  the  Only  Son  of  God:  both  were  products 
of  ressentiment.  . . . 


41. 

— And  from  that  time  onward  an  absurd  prob- 
lem offered  itself:  “how  could  God  allow  it!” 
To  which  the  deranged  reason  of  the  little  com- 
munity formulated  an  answer  that  was  terrify- 
ing in  its  absurdity:  God  gave  his  son  as  a 

sacrifice  for  the  forgiveness  of  sins.  At  once 
there  was  an  end  of  the  gospels!  Sacrifice  for 
sin,  and  in  its  most  obnoxious  and  barbarous 
form:  sacrifice  of  the  innocent  for  the  sins  of  the 
guilty!  What  appalling  paganism! — Jesus  him- 
— 117  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


self  Had  done  away  with  the  very  concept  of 
“guilt,”  he  denied  that  there  was  any  gulf  fixed 
between  God  and  man;  he  lived  this  unity  be- 
tween God  and  man,  and  that  was  precisely  his 
“glad  tidings”.  . . . And  not  as  a mere  privi- 
lege!— From  this  time  forward  the  type  of  the 
Saviour  was  corrupted,  bit  by  bit,  by  the  doc- 
trine of  judgment  and  of  the  second  coming,  the 
doctrine  of  death  as  a sacrifice,  the  doctrine  of 
the  resurrection,  by  means  of  which  the  entire 
concept  of  “blessedness,”  the  whole  and  only 
reality  of  the  gospels,  is  juggled  away — in 
favour  of  a state  of  existence  after  death!  . . . 
St.  Paul,  with  that  rabbinical  impudence  which 
shows  itself  in  all  his  doings,  gave  a logical 
quality  to  that  conception,  that  indecent  con- 
ception, in  this  way:  “If  Christ  did  not  rise 

from  the  dead,  then  all  our  faith  is  in  vain!” — 
And  at  once  there  sprang  from  the  Gospels  the 
most  contemptible  of  all  imfulfillable  promises, 
the  shameless  doctrine  of  personal  immortality. 
. . . Paul  even  preached  it  as  a reward.  . . . 

42. 

One  now  begins  to  see  just  what  it  was  that 
came  to  an  end  with  the  death  on  the  cross:  a 
— 118  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

new  and  thoroughly  original  effort  to  found  a 
Buddhistic  peace  movement,  and  so  establish 
happiness  on  earth — real,  not  merely  promised. 
For  this  remains — as  I have  already  pointed 
out — the  essential  difference  between  the  two  re- 
ligions of  decadence:  Buddhism  promises  noth- 
ing, but  actually  fulfils;  Christianity  promises 
everything,  hut  fulfils  nothing. — Hard  upon  the 
heels  of  the  “glad  tidings”  came  the  worst 
imaginable:  those  of  Paul.  In  Paul  is  incar- 
nated the  very  opposite  of  the  “bearer  of  glad 
tidings”;  he  represents  the  genius  for  hatred,  the 
vision  of  hatred,  the  relentless  logic  of  hatred. 
What,  indeed,  has  not  this  dysangelist  sacrificed 
to  hatred!  Above  all,  the  Saviour:  he  nailed 
him  to  his  own  cross.  The  life,  the  example, 
the  teaching,  the  death  of  Christ,  the  meaning 
and  the  law  of  the  whole  gospels — nothing  was 
left  of  all  this  after  that  counterfeiter  in 
hatred  had  reduced  it  to  his  uses.  Surely  not 
reality;  surely  not  historical  truth!  . . . Once 
more  the  priestly  instinct  of  the  Jew  perpetrated 
the  same  old  master  crime  against  history — he 
simply  struck  out  the  yesterday  and  the  day  be- 
fore yesterday  of  Christianity,  and  invented  his 
own  history  of  Christian  beginnings.  Going 
— 119  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

further,  he  treated  the  history  of  Israel  to  an- 
other falsification,  so  that  it  became  a mere  pro- 
logue to  his  achievement:  all  the  prophets,  it  now 
appeared,  had  referred  to  his  “Saviour.”  . . . 
Later  on  the  church  even  falsified  the  history  of 
man  in  order  to  make  it  a prologue  to  Christi- 
anity. . . . The  figure  of  the  Saviour,  his  teach- 
ing, his  way  of  life,  his  death,  the  meaning  of 
his  death,  even  the  consequences  of  his  death — 
nothing  remained  untouched,  nothing  remained 
in  even  remote  contact  with  reality.  Paul 
simply  shifted  the  centre  of  gravity  of  that  whole 
life  to  a place  behind  this  existence — in  the  lie 
of  the  “risen”  Jesus.  At  bottom,  he  had  no  use 
for  the  life  of  the  Saviour — what  he  needed  was 
the  death  on  the  cross,  and  something  more.  To 
see  anything  honest  in  such  a man  as  Paul,  whose 
home  was  at  the  centre  of  the  Stoical  enlighten- 
ment, when  he  converts  an  hallucination  into  a 
proof  of  the  resurrection  of  the  Saviour,  or  even 
to  believe  his  tale  that  he  suffered  from  this  hal- 
lucination himself — this  would  be  a genuine 
niaiserie  in  a psychologist.  Paul  willed  the 
end;  therefore  he  also  willed  the  means.  . . . 
What  he  himself  didn’t  believe  was  swallowed 
readily  enough  by  the  idiots  among  whom  he 
— 120  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


spread  his  teaching. — ^What  he  wanted  was 
power;  in  Paul  the  priest  once  more  reached  out 
for  power — ^he  had  use  only  for  such  concepts, 
teachings  and  symbols  as  served  the  purpose  of 
tyrannizing  over  the  masses  and  organizing  mohs. 
What  was  the  only  part  of  Christianity  that  Mo- 
hammed borrowed  later  on?  Paul’s  invention, 
his  device  for  establishing  priestly  tyranny  and 
organizing  the  mob:  the  belief  in  the  immor- 
tality of  the  soul — that  is  to  say,  the  doctrine  of 
“judgment” . . . . 


43. 

When  the  centre  of  gravity  of  life  is  placed, 
not  in  life  itself,  but  in  “the  beyond” — in  noth- 
ingness— then  one  has  taken  away  its  centre  of 
gravity  altogether.  The  vast  lie  of  personal  im- 
mortality destroys  all  reason,  all  natural 
instinct — henceforth,  everything  in  the  in- 
stincts that  is  beneficial,  that  fosters  life 
and  that  safeguards  the  future  is  a cause 
of  suspicion.  So  to  live  that  life  no  longer 
has  any  meaning:  this  is  now  the  “meaning”  of 
life.  . . . Why  be  public-spirited?  Why  take 
any  pride  in  descent  and  forefathers?  Why 
labour  together,  trust  one  another,  or  concern 
— 121  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


one’s  self  about  the  common  welfare,  and  try  to 
serve  it?  . . . Merely  so  many  “temptations,” 
so  many  strayings  from  the  “straight  path.” — 
“One  thing  only  is  necessary”.  . . . That  every 
man,  because  he  has  an  “immortal  soul,”  is  as 
good  as  every  other  man;  that  in  an  infinite 
universe  of  things  the  “salvation”  of  every  in- 
dividual may  lay  claim  to  eternal  importance; 
that  insignificant  bigots  and  the  three-fourths  in- 
sane may  assume  that  the  laws  of  nature  are 
constantly  suspended  in  their  behalf — it  is  im- 
possible to  lavish  too  much  contempt  upon  such 
a magnification  of  every  sort  of  selfishness  to 
infinity,  to  insolence.  And  yet  Christianity  has 
to  thank  precisely  this  miserable  flattery  of  per- 
sonal vanity  for  its  triumph — it  was  thus  that  it 
lured  all  the  botched,  the  dissatisfied,  the  fallen 
upon  evil  days,  the  whole  refuse  and  off-scour- 
ing of  humanity  to  its  side.  The  “salvation  of 
the  soul” — in  plain  English:  “the  world  re- 
volves around  me.”  . . . The  poisonous  doc- 
trine, ‘‘equal  rights  for  all,”  has  been  propa- 
gated as  a Christian  principle:  out  of  the  secret 
nooks  and  crannies  of  bad  instinct  Christianity 
has  waged  a deadly  war  upon  all  feelings  of 
reverence  and  distance  between  man  and  man, 
— 122  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

which  is  to  say,  upon  the  first  prerequisite  to 
every  step  upward,  to  every  development  of 
civilization — out  of  the  ressentiment  of  the 
masses  it  has  forged  its  chief  weapons  against  us, 
against  everything  noble,  joyous  and  high- 
spirited  on  earth,  against  our  happiness  on 
earth.  ...  To  allow  “immortality”  to  every 
Peter  and  Paul  was  the  greatest,  the  most  vicious 
outrage  upon  noble  humanity  ever  perpetrated. 
— And  let  us  not  underestimate  the  fatal  influ- 
ence that  Qhristianity  has  had,  even  upon  poli- 
tics! Nowadays  no  one  has  courage  any  more 
for  special  rights,  for  the  right  of  dominion, 
for  feelings  of  honourable  pride  in  himself  and 
his  equals— for  the  pathos  of  distance.  . . . 
Our  politics  is  sick  with  this  lack  of  courage! — 
The  aristocratic  attitude  of  mind  has  been  under- 
mined by  the  lie  of  the  equality  of  souls ; and  if 
belief  in  the  “privileges  of  the  majority”  makes 
and  will  continue  to  make  revolutions — it  is 
Christianity,  let  us  not  doubt,  and  Christian 
valuations,  which  convert  every  revolution  into 
a carnival  of  blood  and  crime!  Christianity 
is  a revolt  of  all  creatures  that  creep  on  the 
ground  against  everything  that  is  lofty:  the 
gospel  of  the  “lowly”  lowers.  . . . 

— 123  — 


t:he  antichrist 


44. 

— The  gospels  are  invaluable  as  evidence  of 
the  corruption  that  was  already  persistent  within 
the  primitive  community.  That  which  Paul, 
with  the  cynical  logic  of  a rabbi,  later  developed 
to  a conclusion  was  at  bottom  merely  a process  of 
decay  that  had  begun  with  the  death  of  the 
Saviour. — These  gospels  cannot  be  read  too  care- 
fully ; difficulties  lurk  behind  every  word.  I con- 
fess— I hope  it  will  not  be  held  against  me — that 
it  is  precisely  for  this  reason  that  they  offer 
first-rate  joy  to  a psychologist — as  the  opposite 
of  all  merely  na'ive  corruption,  as  refinement 
par  excellence,  as  an  artistic  triumph  in  psycho- 
logical corruption.  The  gospels,  in  fact,  stand 
alone.  The  Bible  as  a whole  is  not  to  be  com- 
pared to  them.  Here  we  are  among  Jews: 
this  is  the  first  thing  to  be  home  in  mind  if  we 
are  not  to  lose  the  thread  of  the  matter.  This 
positive  genius  for  conjuring  up  a delusion  of 
personal  “holiness”  unmatched  anywhere  else, 
either  in  books  or  by  men;  this  elevation  of  fraud 
in  word  and  attitude  to  the  level  of  an  art — all 
this  is  not  an  accident  due  to  the  chance  talents 
of  an  individual,  or  to  any  violation  of  nature. 
— 124  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

The  thing  responsible  is  race.  The  whole  of 
Judaism  appears  in  Christianity  as  the  art  of 
concocting  holy  lies,  and  there,  after  many  cen- 
turies of  earnest  Jewish  training  and  hard  prac- 
tice of  Jewish  technic,  the  business  comes  to  the 
stage  of  mastery.  The  Christian,  that  ultima 
ratio  of  lying,  is  the  Jew  all  over  again — he  is 
threefold  the  Jew.  . . . The  underlying  will  to 
make  use  only  of  such  concepts,  symbols  and 
attitudes  as  fit  into  priestly  practice,  the  in- 
stinctive repudiation  of  every  other  mode  of 
thought,  and  every  other  method  of  estimating 
values  and  utilities — this  is  not  only  tradition, 
it  is  inheritance:  only  as  an  inheritance  is  it 
able  to  operate  with  the  force  of  nature.  The 
whole  of  mankind,  even  the  best  minds  of  the 
best  ages  (with  one  exception,  perhaps  hardly 
human — ),  have  permitted  themselves  to  be  de- 
ceived. The  gospels  have  been  read  as  a book  of 
innocence  . . . surely  no  small  indication  of  the 
high  skill  with  which  the  trick  has  been  done. 
— Of  course,  if  we  could  actually  see  these 
astounding  bigots  and  bogus  saints,  even  if  only 
for  an  instant,  the  farce  would  come  to  an  end, 
— and  it  is  precisely  because  I cannot  read  a 
word  of  theirs  without  seeing  their  attitudinizing 
— 125  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


that  / have  made  an  end  of  them.  ...  I simply 
cannot  endure  the  way  tliey  have  of  rolling  up 
their  eyes. — For  the  majority,  happily  enough, 
books  are  mere  literature. — Let  us  not  be  led 
astray:  they  say  “judge  not,”  and  yet  they  con- 
demn to  hell  whoever  stands  in  their  way.  In 
letting  God  sit  in  judgment  they  judge  them- 
selves; in  glorifying  God  they  glorify  them- 
selves; in  demanding  that  every  one  show  the 
virtues  which  they  themselves  happen  to  be 
capable  of — still  more,  which  they  must  have  in 
order  to  remain  on  top — they  assume  the  grand 
air  of  men  struggling  for  virtue,  of  men  en- 
gaging in  a war  that  virtue  may  prevail.  “We 
live,  we  die,  we  sacrifice  ourselves  for  the  good” 
( — “the  truth,”  “the  light,”  “the  kingdom  of 
God”):  in  point  of  fact,  they  simply  do  what 
they  cannot  help  doing.  Forced,  like  hypo- 
crites, to  be  sneaky,  to  hide  in  comers,  to  slink 
along  in  the  shadows,  they  convert  their  neces- 
sity into  a duty:  it  is  on  grounds  of  duty  that 
they  account  for  their  lives  of  humility,  and  that 
humility  becomes  merely  one  more  proof  of  their 
piety.  . . . Ah,  that  humble,  chaste,  charitable 
brand  of  fraud!  “Virtue  itself  shall  bear  wit- 
ness for  us.”.  . . . One  may  read  the  gospels 
— 126  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


as  books  of  moral  seduction:  these  petty  folks 
fasten  themselves  to  morality — they  know  the 
uses  of  morality!  Morality  is  the  best  of  all 
devices  for  leading  mankind  by  the  nose! — The 
fact  is  that  the  conscious  conceit  of  the  chosen 
here  disguises  itself  as  modesty:  it  is  in  this 
way  that  they,  the  “community,”  the  “good  and 
just,”  range  themselves,  once  and  for  always, 
on  one  side,  the  side  of  “the  truth” — and  the 
rest  of  mankind,  “the  world,”  on  the  other.  . . . 
In  that  we  observe  the  most  fatal  sort  of  megalo- 
mania that  the  earth  has  ever  seen:  little  abor- 
tions of  bigots  and  liars  began  to  claim  exclu- 
sive rights  in  the  concepts  of  “God,”  “the  truth,” 
“the  light,”  “the  spirit,”  “love,”  “wisdom”  and 
“life,”  as  if  these  things  were  synonyms  of  them- 
selves and  thereby  they  sought  to  fence  them- 
selves off  from  the  “world”;  little  super-Jews, 
ripe  for  some  sort  of  madhouse,  turned  values 
upside  down  in  order  to  meet  their  notions,  just 
as  if  the  Christian  were  the  meaning,  the  salt, 
the  standard  and  even  the  last  judgment  of  all 
the  rest.  . . . The  whole  disaster  was  only  made 
possible  by  the  fact  that  there  already  existed 
in  the  world  a similar  megalomania,  allied  to 
this  one  in  race,  to  wit,  the  Jewish:  once  a chasm 
— 127  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


began  to  yawn  between  Jews  and  Judaeo-Chris- 
tians,  the  latter  had  no  choice  but  to  employ  the 
self-preservative  measures  that  the  Jewish  in- 
stinct had  devised,  even  against  the  Jews  them- 
selves, whereas  the  Jews  had  employed  them 
only  against  non- Jews.  The  Christian  is  simply 
a Jew  of  the  “reformed”  confession. — 

45. 

— I offer  a few  examples  of  the  sort  of  thing 
these  petty  people  have  got  into  their  heads — 
what  they  have  put  into  the  mouth  of  the  Master: 
the  unalloyed  creed  of  “beautiful  souls.” — 

“And  whosoever  shall  not  receive  you,  nor 
hear  you,  when  ye  depart  thence,  shake  off  the 
dust  under  your  feet  for  a testimony  against 
them.  Verily  I say  unto  you,  it  shall  be  more 
tolerable  for  Sodom  and  Gomorrha  in  the  day  of 
judgment,  than  for  that  city”  (Mark  vi,  11)  — 
How  evangelical!  . . . 

“And  whosoever  shall  offend  one  of  these  little 
ones  that  believe  in  me,  it  is  better  for  him  that 
a millstone  were  hanged  about  his  neck,  and  he 
were  cast  into  the  sea”  (Mark  ix,  42). — How 
evangelical!  . . . 

“And  if  thine  eye  offend  thee,  pluck  it  out: 
— 128  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


is  is  better  for  thee  to  enter  into  the  kingdom  of 
God  with  one  eye,  than  having  two  eyes  to  be 
cast  into  hell  fire ; Where  the  worm  dieth  not,  and 
the  fire  is  not  quenched.”  (Mark  ix,  47.^) — 
It  is  not  exactly  the  eye  that  is  meant.  . . . 

“Verily  I say  unto  you.  That  there  be  some 
of  them  that  stand  here,  which  shall  not  taste  of 
death,  till  they  have  seen  the  kingdom  of  God 
come  with  power.”  (Mark  ix,  1.) — Well  lied, 
lion!  ^ . . . 

“Whosoever  will  come  after  me,  let  him  deny 
himself,  and  take  up  his  cross,  and  follow  me. 
For  . . .”  {Note  of  a psychologist.  Christian 
morality  is  refuted  by  its  fors:  its  reasons  are 
against  it, — this  makes  it  Christian.)  Mark 
viii,  34. — 

“Judge  not,  that  ye  be  not  judged.  With  what 
measure  ye  mete,  it  shall  be  measured  to  you 
again.”  (Matthew  vii,  1.®) — What  a notion  of 
justice,  of  a “just”  judge!  . . . 

“For  if  ye  love  them  which  love  you,  what 
reward  have  ye?  do  not  even  the  publicans  the 

^ To  which,  without  mentioning  it,  Nietzsche  adds  verse  48. 

2 A paraphrase  of  Demetrius’  “Well  roar’d,  Lion!”  in  act  v, 
scene  1 of  “A  Midsummer  Night’s  Dream.”  The  lion,  oi 
course,  is  the  familiar  Christian  symbol  for  Mark. 

3 Nietzsche  also  quotes  part  of  verse  2. 

— 129  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


same?  And  if  ye  salute  your  brethren  only, 
what  do  ye  more  than  others?  do  not  even  the  'jm 
publicans  so?”  (Matthew  v,  46/) — Principle  9 

of  “Christian  love”:  it  insists  upon  being  well  9 
paid  in  the  end.  ... 

“But  if  ye  forgive  not  men  their  trespasses,  9 
neither  will  your  Father  forgive  your  trespasses.”  fl 
(Matthew  vi,  15.) — Very  compromising  for  the  9 
said  “father.”  ...  9 

“But  seek  ye  first  the  kingdom  of  God,  and  his  9 

righteousness ; and  all  these  things  shall  be  added  9 

unto  you.”  (Matthew  vi,  33.) — All  these  jS 

things:  namely,  food,  clothing,  all  the  necessi-  9 

ties  of  life.  An  error,  to  put  it  mildly.  ...  A 9 

bit  before  this  God  appears  as  a tailor,  at  least  -9 

in  certain  cases.  ...  9 

“Rejoice  ye  in  that  day,  and  leap  for  joy:  for,  # 
behold,  your  reward  is  great  in  heaven:  for  in 
the  like  manner  did  their  fathers  unto  the  ■ 

prophets.”  (Luke  vi,  23.) — Impudent  rabble!  ■ 

It  compares  itself  to  the  prophets.  ...  ' 

“Know  ye  not  that  ye  are  the  temple  of  God,  j 
and  that  the  spirit  of  God  dwell eth  in  you?  If 
any  man  defile  the  temple  of  God,  him  shall  God  ■ 
destroy;  for  the  temple  of  God  is  holy,  which  ^ 
^The  quotation  also  includes  verse  47.  ^ 

— 130  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


temple  ye  are.”  (Paul,  1 Corinthians  iii,  16/) 
— For  that  sort  of  thing  one  cannot  have  enough 
contempt.  . . . 

“Do  ye  not  know  that  the  saints  shall  judge 
the  world?  and  if  the  world  shall  be  judged  by 
you,  are  ye  unworthy  to  judge  the  smallest  mat- 
ters?” (Paul,  1 Corinthians  vi,  2.) — Unfortu- 
nately, not  merely  the  speech  of  a lunatic.  . . . 
This  frightful  impostor  then  proceeds:  “Know 

ye  not  that  we  shall  judge  angels?  how  much 
more  things  that  pertain  to  this  life?”  . . . 

“Hath  not  God  made  foolish  the  wisdom  of 
this  world?  For  after  that  in  the  wisdom  of 
God  the  world  by  wisdom  knew  not  God,  it 
pleased  God  by  the  foolishness  of  preaching  to 
save  them  that  believe.  . . . Not  many  wise  men 
after  the  flesh,  not  men  mighty,  not  many  noble 
are  called:  But  God  hath  chosen  the  foolish 

things  of  the  world  to  confound  the  wise;  and 
God  hath  chosen  the  weak  things  of  the  world 
to  confound  the  things  which  are  mighty;  And 
base  things  of  the  world,  and  things  which  are 
despised,  hath  God  chosen,  yea,  and  things  which 
are  not,  to  bring  to  nought  things  that  are : That 

no  flesh  should  glory  in  his  presence.”  (Paul, 


1 And  17. 


— 131  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


1 Corinthians  i,  20ff/) — In  order  to  understand 
this  passage,  a first-rate  example  of  the  psy- 
chology underlying  every  Chandala-morality, 
one  should  read  the  first  part  of  my  “Genealogy 
of  Morals”:  there,  for  the  first  time,  the  antag- 
onism between  a noble  morality  and  a morality 
bom  of  ressentiment  and  impotent  vengefulness 
is  exhibited.  Paul  was  the  greatest  of  all  apos- 
tles of  revenge.  . . . 

46. 

— What  follows,  then?  That  one  had  better 
put  on  gloves  before  reading  the  New  Testament. 
The  presence  of  so  much  filth  makes  it  very 
advisable.  One  would  as  little  choose  “early 
Christians”  for  companions  as  Polish  Jews:  not 
that  one  need  seek  out  an  objection  to  them. 
. . . Neither  has  a pleasant  smell. — I have 
searched  the  New  Testament  in  vain  for  a single 
sympathetic  touch;  nothing  is  there  that  is  free, 
kindly,  open-hearted  or  upright.  In  it  human- 
ity does  not  even  make  the  first  step  upward — 
the  instinct  for  cleanliness  is  lacking.  . . . Only 
evil  instincts  are  there,  and  there  is  not  even  the 
courage  of  these  evil  instincts.  It  is  all  coward- 
1 Verses  20,  21,  26,  27,  28,  29. 

— 132  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

ice;  it  is  all  a shutting  of  the  eyes,  a self-decep- 
tion. Every  other  book  becomes  clean,  once  one 
has  read  the  New  Testament:  for  example,  im- 
mediately after  reading  Paul  I took  up  with 
delight  that  most  charming  and  wanton  of  scoff- 
ers, Petronius,  of  whom  one  may  say  what  Do- 
menico Boccaccio  wrote  of  Caesar  Borgia  to  the 
Duke  of  Parma:  “e  tutto  festo” — immortally 
healthy,  immortally  cheerful  and  sound.  . . . 
These  petty  bigots  make  a capital  miscalculation. 
They  attack,  but  everything  they  attack  is  thereby 
distinguished.  Whoever  is  attacked  by  an 
“early  Christian”  is  surely  not  befouled.  . . . 
On  the  contrary,  it  is  an  honour  to  have  an  “early 
Christian”  as  an  opponent.  One  cannot  read 
the  New  Testament  without  acquired  admiration 
for  whatever  it  abuses — not  to  speak  of  the  “wis- 
dom of  this  world,”  which  an  impudent  wind- 
bag tries  to  dispose  of  “by  the  foolishness  of 
preaching.”  . . . Even  the  scribes  and  pharisees 
are  benefitted  by  such  opposition:  they  must  cer- 
tainly have  been  worth  something  to  have  been 
hated  in  such  an  indecent  manner.  Hypocrisy 
— as  if  this  were  a charge  that  the  “early  Chris- 
tians” dared  to  make!  — After  all,  they  were 
the  privileged,  and  that  was  enough:  the  hatred 
— 133  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


of  the  Chandala  needed  no  other  excuse.  The 
“early  Christian” — and  also,  I fear,  the  “last 
Christian,”  whom  I may  perhaps  live  to  see — 
is  a rebel  against  all  privilege  by  profound  in- 
stinct— he  lives  and  makes  war  for  ever  for 
“equal  rights.”  . . . Strictly  speaking,  he  has 
no  alternative.  When  a man  proposes  to  rep- 
resent, in  his  own  person,  the  “chosen  of  God” — 
or  to  be  a “temple  of  God,”  or  a “judge  of  the 
angels” — ^then  every  other  eriterion,  whether 
based  upon  honesty,  upon  intellect,  upon  manli- 
ness and  pride,  or  upon  beauty  and  freedom  of 
the  heart,  becomes  simply  “worldly” — evil  in 
itself.  . . . Moral:  every  word  that  comes  from 
the  lips  of  an  “early  Christian”  is  a lie,  and  his 
every  act  is  instinctively  dishonest — all  his  val- 
ues, all  his  aims  are  noxious,  but  whoever  he 
hates,  whatever  he  hates,  has  real  value.  . . . 
The  Christian,  and  particularly  the  Christian 
priest,  is  thus  a criterion  of  values. 

— Must  I add  that,  in  the  whole  New  Testa- 
ment, there  appears  but  a solitary  figure  worthy 
of  honour?  Pilate,  the  Roman  viceroy.  To  re- 
gard a Jewish  imbroglio  seriously — that  was 
quite  beyond  him.  One  Jew  more  or  less — 
what  did  it  matter?  . . . The  noble  scorn  of  a 
— 134  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


Roman,  before  whom  the  word  “truth”  was 
shamelessly  mishandled,  enriched  the  New  Tes- 
tament with  the  only  saying  that  has  any  value — 
and  that  is  at  once  its  criticism  and  its  destruc- 
tion: “What  is  truth?  . . . 

47. 

— The  thing  that  sets  us  apart  is  not  that  we 
are  unable  to  find  God,  either  in  history,  or  in 
nature,  or  behind  nature — but  that  we  regard 
what  has  been  honoured  as  God,  not  as  “divine,” 
but  as  pitiable,  as  absurd,  as  injurious;  not  as 
a mere  error,  but  as  a crime  against  life.  . . . 
We  deny  that  God  is  God.  ...  If  any  one  were 
to  show  us  this  Christian  God,  we’d  be  still  less 
inclined  to  believe  in  him. — In  a formula:  deus, 
qualem  Paulus  creavit,  dei  negatio. — Such  a re- 
ligion  as  Christianity,  which  does  not  touch  real- 
ity at  a single  point  and  which  goes  to  pieces^the 
moment  reality  asserts  its  rights  at  any  point, 
must  be  inevitably  the  deadly  eneniy  of  the  “wis- 
dom of  this  world,”  which  is  to  say,  of  science^ — 
and  it  will  give  the  name  of  good  to  whatever 
means  serve  to  poison,  calumniate  and  cry  down 
all  intellectual  discipline,  all  lucidity  and  strict- 
ness in  matters  of  intellectual  conscience,  and 
— 135  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


all  noble  coolness  and  freedom  of  the  mind. 
“Faith,”  as  an  imperative,  vetoes  science — in 
praxi,  lying  at  any  price.  . . . Paul  well  knew 
that  lying — that  “faith” — was  necessary;  later 
on  the  church  borrowed  the  fact  from  Paul. — 
The  God  that  Paul  invented  for  himself,  a God 
who  “reduced  to  absurdity”  “the  wisdom  of  this 
world”  (especially  the  two  great  enemies  of  su- 
perstition, philology  and  medicine),  is  in  truth 
only  an  indication  of  Paul’s  resolute  determina- 
tion to  accomplish  that  very  thing  himself:  to 
give  one’s  own  will  the  name  of  God,  thora — 
that  is  essentially  Jewish.  Paul  wants  to  dis- 
pose of  the  “wisdom  of  this  world” : his  enemies 
are  the  good  philologians  and  physicians  of  the 
Alexandrine  school — on  them  he  makes  his  war. 
As  a matter  of  fact  no  man  can  he  a philologian 
or  a physician  without  being  also  Antichrist. 
That  is  to  say,  as  a philologian  a man  sees  be- 
hind the  “holy  books,”  and  as  a physician  he 
sees  behind  the  physiological  degeneration  of  the 
typical  Christian.  The  physician  says  “incur- 
able”; the  philologian  says  “fraud.”  . . . 


136  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


48. 

— Has  any  one  ever  clearly  understood  the 
celebrated  story  at  the  beginning  of  the  Bible — 
of  God’s  mortal  terror  of  science?  ...  No  one, 
in  fact,  has  understood  it.  This  priest-book  par 
excellence  opens,  as  is  fitting,  with  the  great 
inner  difficulty  of  the  priest:  he  faces  only  one 
great  danger;  ergo,  “God”  faces  only  one  great 
danger. — 

The  old  God,  wholly  “spirit,”  wholly  the 
high-priest,  wholly  perfect,  is  promenading  his 
garden:  he  is  bored  and  trying  to  kill  time. 
Against  boredom  even  gods  struggle  in  vain.^ 
What  does  he  do?  He  creates  man — man  is  en- 
tertaining. . . . But  then  he  notices  that  man  is 
also  bored.  God’s  pity  for  the  only  form  of 
distress  that  invades  all  paradises  knows  no 
bounds:  so  he  forthwith  creates  other  animals. 
God’s  first  mistake:  to  man  these  other  animals 
were  not  entertaining — he  sought  dominion  over 
them;  he  did  not  want  to  be  an  “animal”  him- 
self.— So  God  created  woman.  In  the  act  he 
brought  boredom  to  an  end — and  also  many 

paraphrase  of  Schiller’s  “Against  stupidity  even  gods 
struggle  in  vain.” 


— 137  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


other  things!  Woman  was  the  second  mistake 
of  God. — “Woman,  at  bottom,  is  a serpent, 
Heva” — every  priest  knows  that;  “from  woman 
comes  every  evil  in  the  world” — every  priest 
knows  that,  too.  Ergo,  she  is  also  to  blame  for 
science.  ...  It  was  through  woman  that  man 
learned  to  taste  of  the  tree  of  knowledge. — What 
happened?  The  old  God  was  seized  by  mortal 
terror.  Man  himself  had  been  his  greatest 
blunder;  he  had  created  a rival  to  himself;  sci- 
ence makes  men  godlike — it  is  all  up  with  priests 
and  gods  when  man  becomes  scientific! — Moral: 
science  is  the  forbidden  per  se;  it  alone  is  for- 
bidden. Science  is  the  first  of  sins,  the  germ  of 
all  sins,  the  original  sin.  This  is  all  there  is  of 
morality. — “Thou  shalt  not  know”:- — the  rest 
follows  from  that. — God’s  mortal  terror,  how- 
ever, did  not  hinder  him  from  being  shrewd. 
How  is  one  to  protect  one’s  self  against  science? 
For  a long  while  this  was  the  capital  problem. 
Answer:  Out  of  paradise  with  man!  Happi- 

ness, leisure,  foster  thought — and  all  thoughts 
are  bad  thoughts! — Man  must  not  think. — And 
so  the  priest  invents  distress,  death,  the  mortal 
dangers  of  childbirth,  all  sorts'  of  misery,  old 
age,  decrepitude,  above  all,  sickness — nothing 
— 138  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


but  devices  for  making  war  on  science!  The 
troubles  of  man  don’t  allow  him  to  think.  . . . 
Nevertheless — how  terrible! — , the  edifice  of 
knowledge  begins  to  tower  aloft,  invading 
heaven,  shadowing  the  gods — what  is  to  be  done? 
— The  old  God  invents  war;  he  separates  the 
peoples;  he  makes  men  destroy  one  another 
( — the  priests  have  always  had  need  of  war. . . .) . 
War — among  other  things,  a great  disturber  of 
science! — Incredible!  Knowledge,  deliverance 
from  the  priests,  prospers  in  spite  of  war. — So 
the  old  God  comes  to  his  final  resolution: 
“Man  has  become  scientific — there  is  no  help 
for  it:  he  must  be  drowned!”  . . . 

49. 

— I have  been  understood.  At  the  opening 
of  the  Bible  there  is  the  whole  psychology  of  the 
priest. — The  priest  knows  of  only  one  great  dan- 
ger: that  is  science — the  sound  comprehension 
of  cause  and  effect.  But  science  flourishes,  on 
the  whole,  only  under  favourable  conditions — 
a man  must  have  time,  he  must  have  an  overflow- 
ing intellect,  in  order  to  “know.”  . . . “There- 
fore, man  must  be  made  unhappy,” — this  has 
been,  in  all  ages,  the  logic  of  the  priest. — It  is 
— 139  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


easy  to  see  just  what,  by  this  logic,  was  the  first 
thing  to  come  into  the  world : — “sin.”  . . . The 
concept  of  guilt  and  punishment,  the  whole 
“moral  order  of  the  world,”  was  set  up  against 
science — against  the  deliverance  of  man  from 
priests.  . . . Man  must  not  look  outward;  he 
must  look  inward.  He  must  not  look  at  things 
shrewdly  and  cautiously,  to  learn  about  them; 
he  must  not  look  at  all;  he  must  suffer.  . . . 
And  he  must  suffer  so  much  that  he  is  always  in 
need  of  the  priest. — Away  with  physicians! 
What  is  needed  is  a Saviour. — The  concept  of 
guilt  and  punishment,  including  the  doctrines  of 
“grace,”  of  “salvation,”  of  “forgiveness” — lies 
through  and  through,  and  absolutely  without 
psychological  reality — were  devised  to  destroy 
man’s  sense  of  causality:  they  are  an  attack  upon 
the  concept  of  cause  and  effect! — And  not  an  at- 
tack with  the  fist,  with  the  knife,  with  honesty  in 
hate  and  love!  On  the  contrary,  one  inspired 
by  the  most  cowardly,  the  most  crafty,  the  most 
ignoble  of  instincts!  An  attack  of  priests!  An 
attack  of  parasites!  The  vampirism  of  pale, 
subterranean  leeches!  . . . When  the  natural 
consequences  of  an  act  are  no  longer  “natural,” 
but  are  regarded  as  produced  by  the  ghostly 
— 140  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


creations  of  superstition — by  “God,”  by  “spir- 
its,” by  “souls” — and  reckoned  as  merely 
“moral”  consequences,  as  rewards,  as  punish- 
ments, as  hints,  as  lessons,  then  the  whole 
ground-work  of  knowledge  is  destroyed — then 
the  greatest  of  crimes  against  humanity  has  been 
perpetrated. — I repeat  that  sin,  man’s  self-dese- 
cration  par  excellence,  was  invented  in  order  to 
make  science,  culture,  and  every  elevation  and 
ennobling  of  man  impossible;  the  priest  rules 
through  the  invention  of  sin. — 

50. 

— In  this  place  I can’t  permit  myself  to  omit 
a psychology  of  “belief,”  of  the  “believer,”  for 
the  special  benefit  of  “believers.”  If  there  re- 
main any  today  who  do  not  yet  know  how  in- 
decent it  is  to  be  “believing” — or  how  much  a 
sign  of  decadence,  of  a broken  will  to  live — 
then  they  will  know  it  well  enough  tomorrow. 
My  voice  reaches  even  the  deaf. — It  appears,  un- 
less I have  been  incorrectly  informed,  that  there 
prevails  among  Christians  a sort  of  criterion  of 
truth  that  is  called  “proof  by  power.”  “Faith 
makes  blessed:  therefore  it  is  true.” — It  might 
be  objected  right  here  that  blessedness  is  not  dem- 
— 141  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

onstrated,  it  is  merely  promised:  it  hangs  upon 
“faith”  as  a condition — one  shall  be  blessed  be- 
cause one  believes.  . . . But  what  of  the  thing 
that  the  priest  promises  to  the  believer,  the 
wholly  transcendental  “beyond” — how  is  that  to 
be  demonstrated? — The  “proof  by  power,”  thus 
assumed,  is  actually  no  more  at  bottom  than 
a belief  that  the  effects  which  faith  promises  will 
not  fail  to  appear.  In  a formula:  “I  believe 

that  faith  makes  for  blessedness — therefore,  it  is 
true.”  . . . But  this  is  as  far  as  we  may  go. 
This  “therefore”  would  be  absurdum  itself  as  a 
criterion  of  truth. — But  let  us  admit,  for  the  sake 
of  politeness,  that  blessedness  by  faith  may  be 
demonstrated  ( — not  merely  hoped  for,  and  not 
merely  promised  by  the  suspicious  lips  of  a 
priest) : even  so,  could  blessedness — in  a techni- 
cal term,  pleasure — ever  be  a proof  of  truth? 
So  little  is  this  true  that  it  is  almost  a proof 
against  truth  when  sensations  of  pleasure  influ- 
ence the  answer  to  the  question  “What  is  true?” 
or,  at  all  events,  it  is  enough  to  make  that  “truth” 
highly  suspicious.  The  proof  by  “pleasure”  is 
a proof  of  “pleasure” — nothing  more;  why  in 
the  world  should  it  be  assumed  that  true  judg- 
ments give  more  pleasure  than  false  ones,  and 
— 142  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


that,  in  conformity  to  some  pre-established  har- 
mony, they  necessarily  bring  agreeable  feelings 
in  their  train? — The  experience  of  all  disciplined 
and  profound  minds  teaches  the  contrary.  Man 
has  had  to  fight  for  every  atom  of  the  truth,  and 
has  had  to  pay  for  it  almost  everything  that  the 
heart,  that  human  love,  that  human  trust  cling 
to.  Greatness  of  soul  is  needed  for  this  busi- 
ness: the  service  of  truth  is  the  hardest  of  all 
services. — ^What,  then,  is  the  meaning  of  integ- 
rity in  things  intellectual?  It  means  that  a man 
must  be  severe  with  his  own  heart,  that  he  must 
scorn  “beautiful  feelings,”  and  that  he  makes 
every  Yea  and  Nay  a matter  of  conscience! — 
Faith  makes  blessed:  therefore,  it  lies.  . . . 

51. 

The  fact  that  faith,  under  certain  circum- 
stances, may  work  for  blessedness,  but  that  this 
blessedness  produced  by  an  idee  fixe  by  no  means 
makes  the  idea  itself  true,  and  the  fact  that  faith 
actually  moves  no  mountains,  but  instead  raises 
them  up  where  there  were  none  before:  all  this 
is  made  sufficiently  clear  by  a walk  through  a 
lunatic  asylum.  Not,  of  course,  to  a priest:  for 
his  instincts  prompt  him  to  the  lie  that  sickness 
— 143  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


is  not  sickness  and  lunatic  asylums  not  lunatic 
asylums.  Christianity  finds  sickness  necessary, 
just  as  the  Greek  spirit  had  need  of  a superabun- 
dance of  health — the  actual  ulterior  purpose  of 
the  whole  system  of  salvation  of  the  ehurch  is  to 
make  people  ill.  And  the  church  itself — doesn’t 
it  set  up  a Catholic  lunatic  asylum  as  the  ulti- 
mate ideal? — The  whole  earth  as  a madhouse? 
— The  sort  of  religious  man  that  the  church 
wants  is  a typical  decadent;  the  moment  at  which 
a religious  crisis  dominates  a people  is  always 
marked  by  epidemics  of  nervous  disorder;  the 
“inner  world”  of  the  religious  man  is  so  much 
like  the  “inner  world”  of  the  overstrung  and  ex- 
hausted that  it  is  difficult  to  distinguish  between 
them;  the  “highest”  states  of  mind,  held  up  be- 
fore mankind  by  Christianity  as  of  supreme 
worth,  are  aetually  epileptoid  in  form — the 
church  has  granted  the  name  of  holy  only  to 
lunatics  or  to  gigantic  frauds  in  majorem  dei 
honorem.  . . . Once  I ventured  to  designate  the 
whole  Christian  system  of  training  ^ in  penance 
and  salvation  (now  best  studied  in  England)  as 
a method  of  producing  a folie  circulaire  upon  a 
soil  already  prepared  for  it,  which  is  to  say,  a 
soil  thoroughly  unhealthy.  Not  every  one  may 

1 The  word  training  is  in  English  in  the  text, 

— 144  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

be  a Christian:  one  is  not  “converted”  to  Chris- 
tianity— one  must  first  be  sick  enough  for  it. 
. . . We  others,  who  have  the  courage  for  health 
and  likewise  for  contempt, — we  may  well  de- 
spise a religion  that  teaches  misunderstanding  of 
the  body!  that  refuses  to  rid  itself  of  the  super- 
stition about  the  soul!  that  makes  a “virtue”  of 
insufficient  nourishment!  that  combats  health  as 
a sort  of  enemy,  devil,  temptation!  that  persuades 
itself  that  it  is  possible  to  carry  about  a “per- 
fect soul”  in  a cadaver  of  a body,  and  that,  to 
this  end,  had  to  devise  for  itself  a new  concept 
of  “perfection,”  a pale,  sickly,  idiotically  ecs- 
tatic state  of  existence,  so-called  “holiness” — a 
holiness  that  is  itself  merely  a series  of  symp- 
toms of  an  impoverished,  enervated  and  in- 
curably disordered  body!  . . . The  Christian 
movement,  as  a European  movement,  was  from 
the  start  no  more  than  a general  uprising  of 
all  sorts  of  outcast  and  refuse  elements  ( — ^who 
now,  under  cover  of  Christianity,  aspire  to 
power).  It  does  not  represent  the  decay  of  a 
race;  it  represents,  on  the  contrary,  a conglom- 
eration of  decadence  products  from  all  direc- 
tions, crowding  together  and  seeking  one  another 
out.  It  was  not,  as  has  been  thought,  the  corrup- 
tion of  antiquity,  of  noble  antiquity,  which  made 
— 145  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


Christianity  possible;  one  cannot  too  sharply 
challenge  the  learned  imbecility  which  today 
maintains  that  theory.  At  the  time  when  the  sick 
and  rotten  Chandala  classes  in  the  whole  impe- 
rium  were  Christianized,  the  contrary  type,  the 
nobility,  reached  its  finest  and  ripest  develop- 
ment. The  majority  became  master;  democ- 
racy, with  its  Christian  instincts,  triumphed. 
. . . Christianity  was  not  “national,”  it  was  not 
based  on  race — it  appealed  to  all  the  varieties 
of  men  disinherited  by  life,  it  had  its  allies 
everywhere.  Christianity  has  the  rancour  of  the 
sick  at  its  very  core — the  instinct  against  the 
healthy,  against  health.  Everything  that  is  well- 
constituted,  proud,  gallant  and,  above  all,  beau- 
tiful gives  offence  to  its  ears  and  eyes.  Again 
I remind  you  of  Paul’s  priceless  saying:  “And 

God  hath  chosen  the  weak  things  of  the  world, 
the  foolish  things  of  the  world,  the  base  things 
of  the  world,  and  things  which  are  despised” : ^ 
this  was  the  formula ; in  hoc  signo  the  decadence 
triumphed. — God  on  the  cross — is  man  always 
to  miss  the  frightful  inner  significance  of  this 
symbol? — Everything  that  suffers,  everything 
that  hangs  on  the  cross,  is  divine.  . . . We  all 
'■I  Corinthians  i,  27,  28. 

— 146  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


hang  on  the  cross,  consequently  we  are  divine. 
...  We  alone  are  divine.  . . . Christianity  was 
thus  a victory:  a nobler  attitude  of  mind  was 
destroyed  by  it — Christianity  remains  to  this  day 
the  greatest  misfortune  of  humanity. — 

52. 

Christianity  also  stands  in  opposition  to  all 
intellectual  well-being, — sick  reasoning  is  the 
only  sort  that  it  can  use  as  Christian  reasoning; 
it  takes  the  side  of  everything  that  is  idiotic;  it 
pronounces  a curse  upon  “intellect,”  upon  the 
superbia  of  the  healthy  intellect.  Since  sick- 
ness is  inherent  in  Christianity,  it  follows  that 
the  typically  Christian  state  of  “faith”  must  be 
a form  of  sickness  too,  and  that  all  straight, 
straightforward  and  scientific  paths  to  knowledge 
must  be  banned  by  the  church  as  forbidden  ways. 
Doubt  is  thus  a sin  from  the  start.  . . . The 
complete  lack  of  psychological  cleanliness  in  the 
priest — revealed  by  a glance  at  him — is  a phe- 
nomenon resulting  from  decadence, — one  may 
observe  in  hysterical  women  and  in  rachitic  chil- 
dren how  regularly  the  falsification  of  instincts, 
delight  in  lying  for  the  mere  sake  of  lying,  and 
incapacity  for  looking  straight  and  walking 
— 147  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


straight  are  symptoms  of  decadence.  “Faith” 
means  the  will  to  avoid  knowing  what  is  true. 
The  pietist,  the  priest  of  either  sex,  is  a fraud 
because  he  is  sick:  his  instinct  demands  that  the 
truth  shall  never  be  allowed  its  rights  on  any 
point.  “Whatever  makes  for  illness  is  good; 
whatever  issues  from  abundance,  from  super- 
abundance, from  power,  is  evil” : so  argues  the 
believer.  The  impulse  to  lie — it  is  by  this  that 
I recognize  every  foreordained  theologian. — 
Another  characteristic  of  the  theologian  is  his 
unfitness  for  philology.  What  I here  mean  by 
philology  is,  in  a general  sense,  the  art  of  read- 
ing with  profit — the  capacity  for  absorbing  facts 
without  interpreting  them  falsely,  and  without 
losing  caution,  patience  and  subtlety  in  the  ef- 
fort to  understand  them.  Philology  as  ephexis  ^ 
in  interpretation:  whether  one  be  dealing  with 
books,  with  newspaper  reports,  with  the  most 
fateful  events  or  with  weather  statistics — not  to 
mention  the  “salvation  of  the  soul.”  . . . The 
way  in  which  a theologian,  whether  in  Berlin  or 
in  Rome,  is  ready  to  explain,  say,  a “passage 
of  Scripture,”  or  an  experience,  or  a victory  by 

1 That  is,  to  say,  scepticism.  Among  the  Greeks  scepticism 
was  also  occasionally  called  ephecticism. 

— 148  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


the  national  army,  by  turning  upon  it  the  high 
illumination  of  the  Psalms  of  David,  is  always 
so  daring  that  it  is  enough  to  make  a philologian 
run  up  a wall.  But  what  shall  he  do  when 
pietists  and  other  such  cows  from  Suabia  ^ use 
the  “finger  of  God”  to  convert  their  miserably 
commonplace  and  huggermugger  existence  into 
a miracle  of  “grace,”  a “providence”  and  an 
“experience  of  salvation”?  The  most  modest 
exercise  of  the  intellect,  not  to  say  of  decency, 
should  certainly  be  enough  to  convince  these 
interpreters  of  the  perfect  childishness  and  un- 
worthiness of  such  a misuse  of  the  divine  digital 
dexterity.  However  small  our  piety,  if  we  ever 
encountered  a god  who  always  cured  us  of  a cold 
in  the  head  at  just  the  right  time,  or  got  us  into 
our  carriage  at  the  very  instant  heavy  rain  began 
to  fall,  he  would  seem  so  absurd  a god  that  he’d 
have  to  be  abolished  even  if  he  existed.  God 
as  a domestic  servant,  as  a letter  carrier,  as  an 
ahnanac-man — at  bottom,  he  is  a mere  name  for 
the  stupidest  sort  of  chance.  ...  “Divine  Prov- 

1 A reference  to  the  University  of  Tiibingen  and  its  famous 
school  of  Biblical  criticism.  The  leader  of  this  school  was 
F.  C.  Baur,  and  one  of  the  men  greatly  influenced  by  it  was 
Nietzsche’s  pet  abomination,  David  F.  Strauss,  himself  a 
Suabian.  Vide  § 10  and  § 28. 

— 14P  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


idence,”  which  every  third  man  in  “educated 
Germany”  still  believes  in,  is  so  strong  an  argu- 
ment against  God  that  it  would  be  impossible 
to  think  of  a stronger.  And  in  any  case  it  is  an 
argument  against  Germans!  . . . 

53. 

— It  is  so  little  true  that  martyrs  offer  any 
support  to  the  truth  of  a cause  that  I am  inclined 
to  deny  that  any  martyr  has  ever  had  anything 
to  do  with  the  truth  at  all.  In  the  very  tone  in 
which  a martyr  flings  what  he  fancies  to  be  true 
at  the  head  of  the  world  there  appears  so  low  a 
grade  of  intellectual  honesty  and  such  insensi- 
bility to  the  problem  of  “truth,”  that  it  is  never 
necessary  to  refute  him.  Truth  is  not  something 
that  one  man  has  and  another  man  has  not:  at 
best,  only  peasants,  or  peasant-apostles  like  Lu- 
ther, can  think  of  truth  in  any  such  way.  One 
may  rest  assured  that  the  greater  the  degree  of 
a man’s  intellectual  conscience  the  greater  will 
be  his  modesty,  his  discretion,  on  this  point. 
To  know  in  five  cases,  and  to  refuse,  with  deli- 
cacy, to  know  anything  further.  . . . “Truth,” 
as  the  word  is  understood  by  every  prophet,  every 
sectarian,  every  free-thinker,  every  Socialist  and 
every  churchman,  is  simply  a complete  proof 
— 150  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

that  not  even  a beginning  has  been  made  in  the 
intellectual  discipline  and  self-control  that  are 
necessary  to  the  unearthing  of  even  the  smallest 
truth. — The  deaths  of  the  martyrs,  it  may  be 
said  in  passing,  have  been  misfortunes  of  history: 
they  have  misled.  . . . The  conclusion  that  all 
idiots,  women  and  plebeians  come  to,  that  there 
must  be  something  in  a cause  for  which  any  one 
goes  to  his  death  (or  which,  as  under  primitive 
Christianity,  sets  off  epidemics  of  death-seek- 
ing)— this  conclusion  has  been  an  unspeakable 
drag  upon  the  testing  of  facts,  upon  the  whole 
spirit  of  inquiry  and  investigation.  The  mar- 
tyrs have  damaged  the  truth.  . . . Even  to  this 
day  the  crude  fact  of  persecution  is  enough  to 
give  an  honourable  name  to  the  most  empty  sort  ' 
of  sectarianism. — But  why?  Is  the  worth  of  a 
cause  altered  by  the  fact  that  some  one  had  laid 
down  his  life  for  it? — An  error  that  becomes 
honourable  is  simply  an  error  that  has  acquired 
one  seductive  charm  the  more:  do  you  suppose, 
Messrs..  Theologians,  that  we  shall  give  you  the 
chance  to  be  martyred  for  your  lies? — One  best 
disposes  of  a cause  by  respectfully  putting  it  on 
ice — that  is  also  the  best  way  to  dispose  of 
theologians.  . . . This  was  precisely  the  world- 
— 151  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


historical  stupidity  of  all  the  persecutors:  that 
they  gave  the  appearance  of  honour  to  the  cause 
they  opposed — that  they  made  it  a present  of  the 
fascination  of  martyrdom.  . . . Women  are  still 
on  their  knees  before  an  error  because  they  have 
been  told  that  some  one  died  on  the  cross  for  it. 
Is  the  cross,  then,  an  argument? — But  about  all 
these  things  there  is  one,  and  one  only,  who  has 
said  what  has  been  needed  for  thousands  of 
years — Zarathustra. 

They  made  signs  in  blood  along  the  way  that  they 
went,  and  their  folly  taught  them  that  the  truth  is 
proved  by  blood. 

But  blood  is  the  worst  of  all  testimonies  to  the 
truth;  blood  poisoneth  even  the  purest  teaching  and 
turneth  it  into  madness  and  hatred  in  the  heart. 

And  when  one  goeth  through  fire  for  his  teaching — 
what  doth  that  prove?  Verily,  it  is  more  when  one’s 
teaching  oometh  out  of  one’s  own  burning!  ^ 

54. 

Do  not  let  yourself  be  deceived:  great  intel- 
lects are  sceptieal.  Zarathustra  is  a sceptic. 
The  strength,  the  freedom  which  proceed  from 
intelleetual  power,  from  a superabundanee  of 
intellectual  power,  manifest  themselves  as  scep- 

1 The  quotations  are  from  “Also  sprach  Zarathustra”  ii,  24: 
“Of  Priests.” 


— 152  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

ticism.  Men  of  fixed  convictions  do  not  count 
when  it  comes  to  determining  what  is  fundamen- 
tal in  values  and  lack  of  values.  Men  of  con- 
victions are  prisoners.  They  do  not  see  far 
enough,  they  do  not  see  what  is  below  them: 
whereas  a man  who  would  talk  to  any  purpose 
about  value  and  non-value  must  be  able  to  see 
five  hundred  convictions  beneath  him — and  be- 
hind him.  ...  A mind  that  aspires  to  great 
things,  and  that  wills  the  means  thereto,  is  neces- 
sarily sceptical.  Freedom  from  any  sort  of  con- 
viction belongs  to  strength,  and  to  an  independ- 
ent point  of  view.  . . . That  grand  passion 
which  is  at  once  the  foundation  and  the  power  of 
a sceptic’s  existence,  and  is  both  more  enlight- 
ened and  more  despotic  than  he  is  himself,  drafts 
the  whole  of  his  intellect  into  its  service ; it  makes 
him  unscrupulous;  it  gives  him  courage  to  em- 
ploy unholy  means ; under  certain  circumstances 
it  does  not  begrudge  him  even  convictions.  Con- 
viction as  a means : one  may  achieve  a good  deal 
by  means  of  a conviction.  A grand  passion 
makes  use  of  and  uses  up  convictions;  it  does 
not  yield  to  them — it  knows  itself  to  be  sovereign. 
— On  the  contrary,  the  need  of  faith,  of  some- 
thing unconditioned  by  yea  or  nay,  of  Carlylism, 
— 153  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

if  I may  be  allowed  the  word,  is  a need  of  weak- 
ness. The  man  of  faith,  the  “believer”  of  any 
sort,  is  necessarily  a dependent  man — such  a 
man  cannot  posit  himself  as  a goal,  nor  can  he 
find  goals  within  himself.  The  “believer”  does 
not  belong  to  himself;  he  can  only  be  a means 
to  an  end;  he  must  be  used  up;  he  needs  some 
one  to  use  him  up.  His  instinct  gives  the  high- 
est honours  to  an  ethic  of  self-effacement;  he 
is  prompted  to  embrace  it  by  everything:  his 
prudence,  his  experience,  his  vanity.  Every 
sort  of  faith  is  in  itself  an  evidence  of  self- 
effacement,  of  self -estrangement.  . . . When 
one  reflects  how  necessary  it  is  to  the  great  ma- 
jority that  there  be  regulations  to  restrain  them 
from  without  and  hold  them  fast,  and  to  what 
extent  control,  or,  in  a higher  sense,  slavery, 
is  the  one  and  only  condition  which  makes  for 
the  well-being  of  the  weak-willed  man,  and  espe- 
cially woman,  then  one  at  once  understands  con- 
viction and  “faith.”  To  the  man  with  convic- 
tions they  are  his  backbone.  To  avoid  seeing 
many  things,  to  be  impartial  about  nothing,  to 
be  a party  man  through  and  through,  to  estimate 
all  values  strictly  and  infallibly — these  are  con- 
ditions necessary  to  the  existence  of  such  a man. 
— 154  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


But  by  the  same  token  they  are  antagonists  of  the 
truthful  man — of  the  truth.  . . . The  believer 
is  not  free  to  answer  the  question,  “true”  or  “not 
true,”  according  to  the  dictates  of  his  own  con- 
science: integrity  on  this  point  would  work  his 
instant  downfall.  The  pathological  limitations 
of  his  vision  turn  the  man  of  convictions  into  a 
fanatic — Savonarola,  Luther,  Rousseau,  Robes- 
pierre, Saint-Simon — these  types  stand  in  oppo- 
sition to  the  strong,  emancipated  spirit.  But  the 
grandiose  attitudes  of  these  sick  intellects,  these 
intellectual  epileptics,  are  of  influence  upon  the 
great  masses — fanatics  are  picturesque,  and  man- 
kind prefers  observing  poses  to  listening  to  rea- 
sons. . . . 

55. 

— One  step  further  in  the  psychology  of  con- 
viction, of  “faith.”  It  is  now  a good  while 
since  I first  proposed  for  consideration  the  ques- 
tion whether  convictions  are  not  even  more  dan- 
gerous enemies  to  truth  than  lies.  (“Human, 
All-Too-Human,”  I,  aphorism  483.)^  This  time 
I desire  to  put  the  question  definitely:  is  there 

1 The  aphorism,  which  is  headed  “The  Enemies  of  Truth,” 
makes  the  direct  statement;  “Convictions  are  more  dangerous 
enemies  of  truth  than  lies.” 

— 155  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


any  actual  difference  between  a lie  and  a con- 
viction?— All  the  world  believes  that  there  is; 
but  what  is  not  believed  by  all  the  world! — 
Every  conviction  has  its  history,  its  primitive 
forms,  its  stage  of  tentativeness  and  error:  it 
becomes  a conviction  only  after  having  been,  for 
a long  time,  not  one,  and  then,  for  an  even  longer 
time,  hardly  one.  What  if  falsehood  be  also 
one  of  these  embryonic  forms  of  conviction? — 
Sometimes  all  that  is  needed  is  a change  in  per- 
sons: what  was  a lie  in  the  father  becomes  a con- 
viction in  the  son. — I call  it  lying  to  refuse  to 
see  what  one  sees,  or  to  refuse  to  see  it  as  it  is: 
whether  the  lie  be  uttered  before  witnesses  or  not 
before  witnesses  is  of  no  consequence.  The  most 
common  sort  of  lie  is  that  by  which  a man  de- 
ceives himself:  the  deception  of  others  is  a rela- 
tively rare  offence. — Now,  this  will  not  to  see 
what  one  sees,  this  will  not  to  see  it  as  it  is,  is 
almost  the  first  requisite  for  all  who  belong  to 
a party  of  whatever  sort:  the  party  man  becomes 
inevitably  a liar.  For  example,  the  German  his- 
torians are  convinced  that  Rome  was  synonymous 
with  despotism  and  that  the  Germanic  peoples 
brought  the  spirit  of  liberty  into  the  world : what 
is  the  difference  between  this  conviction  and  a 
— 156  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


lie?  Is  it  to  be  wondered  at  that  all  partisans, 
including  the  German  historians,  instinctively 
roll  the  fine  phrases  of  morality  upon  their 
tongues — that  morality  almost  owes  its  very  sur- 
vival to  the  fact  that  the  party  man  of  every  sort 
has  need  of  it  every  moment? — “This  is  our  con- 
viction: we  publish  it  to  the  whole  world;  we 
live  and  die  for  it — let  us  respect  all  who  have 
convictions!” — I have  actually  heard  such  senti- 
ments from  the  mouths  of  anti-Semites.  On  the 
contrary,  gentlemen!  An  anti-Semite  surely 
does  not  become  more  respectable  because  he 
lies  on  principle.  . . . The  priests,  who  have 
more  finesse  in  such  matters,  and  who  well  un- 
derstand the  objection  that  lies  against  the  notion 
of  a conviction,  which  is  to  say,  of  a falsehood 
that  becomes  a matter  of  principle  because  it 
serves  a purpose,  have  borrowed  from  the  Jews 
the  shrewd  device  of  sneaking  in  the  concepts, 
“God,”  “the  will  of  God”  and  “the  revelation  of 
God”  at  this  place.  Kant,  too,  with  his  cate- 
gorical imperative,  was  on  tlie  same  road:  this 
was  his  practical  reason.^  There  are  questions 
regarding  the  truth  or  untruth  of  which  it  is  not 

^ A reference,  of  course,  to  Kant’s  “Kritik  der  praktischen 
Vernunft”  (Critique  of  Practical  Reason). 

— 157  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


for  man  to  decide;  all  die  capital  questions,  all 
the  capital  problems  of  valuation,  are  beyond 
human  reason.  ...  To  know  the  limits  of  rea- 
son— that  alone  is  genuine  philosophy.  . . . 
|Why  did  God  make  a revelation  to  man?  Would 
God  have  done  anything  superfluous?  Man 
could  not  find  out  for  himself  what  was  good  and 
what  was  evil,  so  God  taught  him  His  will.  . . . 
Moral:  the  priest  does  not  lie — the  question, 
“true”  or  “untrue,”  has  nothing  to  do  with  such 
things  as  the  priest  discusses;  it  is  impossible  to 
lie  about  these  things.  In  order  to  lie  here  it 
would  be  necessary  to  know  what  is  true.  But 
this  is  more  than  man  can  know;  therefore,  the 
priest  is  simply  the  mouth-piece  of  God. — Such 
a priestly  syllogism  is  by  no  means  merely  Jew- 
ish and  Christian ; the  right  to  lie  and  the  shrewd 
dodge  of  “revelation”  belong  to  the  general 
priestly  type — to  the  priest  of  the  decadence  as 
well  as  to  the  priest  of  pagan  times  ( — Pagans 
are  all  those  who  say  yes  to  life,  and  to  whom 
“God”  is  a word  signifying  acquiescence  in  all 
things).— The  “law,”  the  “will  of  God,”  the 
“holy  book,”  and  “inspiration” — all  these  things 
are  merely  words  for  the  conditions  under  which 
the  priest  comes  to  power  and  with  which  he 
— 158  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


maintains  his  power, — these  concepts  are  to  be 
found  at  the  bottom  of  all  priestly  organizations, 
and  of  all  priestly  or  priestly-philosophical 
schemes  of  governments.  The  “holy  lie” — com- 
mon alike  to  Confucius,  to  the  Code  of  Manu,  to 
Mohammed  and  to  the  Christian  church — is  not 
even  wanting  in  Plato.  “Truth  is  here”:  this 
means,  no  matter  where  it  is  heard,  the  priest 
lies.  . . . 


56. 

— In  the  last  analysis  it  comes  to  this:  what  is 
the  end  of  lying?  The  fact  that,  in  Christianity, 
“holy”  ends  are  not  visible  is  my  objection  to 
the  means  it  employs.  Only  had  ends  appear: 
the  poisoning,  the  calumniation,  the  denial  of 
life,  the  despising  of  the  body,  the  degradation 
and  self-contamination  of  man  by  the  concept  of 
sin — therefore,  its  means  are  also  bad. — I have 
a contrary  feeling  when  I read  the  Code  of  Manu, 
an  incomparably  more  intellectual  and  superior 
work,  which  it  would  be  a sin  against  the  in- 
telligence to  so  much  as  name  in  the  same  breath 
with  the  Bible.  It  is  easy  to  see  why:  there  is  a 
genuine  philosophy  behind  it,  in  it,  not  merely 
an  evil-smelling  mess  of  Jewish  rabbinism  and 
— 159  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


superstition, — it  gives  even  the  most  fastidious 
psychologist  something  to  sink  his  teeth  into. 
And,  not  to  forget  what  is  most  important,  it 
differs  fundamentally  from  every  kind  of  Bible: 
by  means  of  it  the  nobles,  the  philosophers  and 
the  warriors  keep  the  whip-hand  over  the  ma- 
jority; it  is  full  of  noble  valuations,  it  shows  a 
feeling  of  perfection,  an  acceptance  of  life,  and 
triumphant  feeling  toward  self  and  life — the  sun 
shines  upon  the  whole  book. — All  the  things  on 
which  Christianity  vents  its  fathomless  vulgar- 
ity— for  example,  procreation,  women  and  mar- 
riage— are  here  handled  earnestly,  with  rever- 
ence and  with  love  and  confidence.  How  can 
any  one  really  put  into  the  hands  of  children  and 
ladies  a book  which  contains  such  vile  things  as 
this:  “to  avoid  fornication,  let  every  man  have 
his  own  wife,  and  let  every  woman  have  her  own 
husband;  ...  it  is  better  to  marry  than  to 
bum”?  ^ And  is  it  possible  to  be  a Christian 
so  long  as  the  origin  of  man  is  Christianized, 
which  is  to  say,  befouled,  by  the  doctrine  of  the 
immaculata  conceptio?  ...  I know  of  no  book 
in  which  so  many  delicate  and  kindly  things  are 
said  of  women  as  in  the  Code  of  Manu ; these  old 

1 1 Corinthians  vii,  2,  9. 

— 160  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


grey-beards  and  saints  have  a way  of  being  gal- 
lant to  women  that  it  would  be  impossible,  per- 
haps, to  surpass.  “The  mouth  of  a woman,”  it 
says  in  one  place,  “the  breasts  of  a maiden,  the 
prayer  of  a child  and  the  smoke  of  sacrifice  are 
always  pure.”  In  another  place : “there  is  noth- 
ing purer  than  the  light  of  the  sun,  the  shadow 
cast  by  a cow,  air,  water,  fire  and  the  breath  of  a 
maiden.”  Finally,  in  still  another  place — per- 
haps this  is  also  a holy  lie — : “all  the  orifices  of 
the  body  above  the  navel  are  pure,  and  all  below 
are  impure.  Only  in  the  maiden  is  the  whole 
body  pure.” 

57. 

One  catches  the  unholiness  of  Christian  means 
in  flagranti  by  the  simple  process  of  putting  the 
ends  sought  by  Christianity  beside  the  ends 
sought  by  the  Code  of  Manu — by  putting  these 
enormously  antithetical  ends  under  a strong  light. 
The  critic  of  Christianity  cannot  evade  the  neces- 
sity of  making  Christianity  contemptible. — A 
book  of  laws  such  as  the  Code  of  Manu  has  the 
same  origin  as  every  other  good  law-book : it  epit- 
omizes the  experience,  the  sagacity  and  the  ethi- 
cal experimentation  of  long  centuries;  it  brings 
— 161  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


things  to  a conclusion;  it  no  longer  creates.  The 
prerequisite  to  a codification  of  this  sort  is  recog- 
nition of  the  fact  that  the  means  which  establish 
the  authority  of  a slowly  and  painfully  attained 
truth  are  fundamentally  different  from  those 
which  one  would  make  use  of  to  prove  it.  A 
law-book  never  recites  the  utility,  the  grounds, 
the  casuistical  antecedents  of  a law:  for  if  it  did 
so  it  would  lose  the  imperative  tone,  the  “thou 
shalt,”  on  which  obedience  is  based.  The  prob- 
lem lies  exactly  here. — At  a certain  point  in  the 
evolution  of  a people,  the  class  within  it  of  the 
greatest  insight,  which  is  to  say,  the  greatest  hind- 
sight and  foresight,  declares  that  the  series  of 
experiences  determining  how  all  shall  live — or 
can  live — has  come  to  an  end.  The  object  now 
is  to  reap  as  rich  and  as  complete  a harvest  as 
possible  from  the  days  of  experiment  and  hard 
experience.  In  consequence,  the  thing  that  is  to 
be  avoided  above  everything  is  further  experi- 
mentation— the  continuation  o^  the  state  in  which 
values  are  fluent,  and  are  tested,  chosen  and  criti- 
cized ad  infinitum.  Against  this  a double  wall  is 
set  up : on  the  one  hand,  revelation,  which  is  the 
assumption  that  the  reasons  lying  behind  the  laws 
are  not  of  human  origin,  that  they  were  not  sought 
— 162  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

out  and  found  by  a slow  process  and  after  many 
errors,  but  that  they  are  of  divine  ancestry,  and 
came  into  being  complete,  perfect,  without  a his- 
tory, as  a free  gift,  a miracle  . . . ; and  on  the 
other  hand,  tradition,  which  is  the  assumption 
that  the  law  has  stood  unchanged  from  time  im- 
memorial, and  that  it  is  impious  and  a crime 
against  one’s  forefathers  to  bring  it  into  question. 
The  authority  of  the  law  is  thus  grounded  on  the 
thesis:  God  gave  it,  and  the  fathers  lived  it. — 

The  higher  motive  of  such  procedure  lies  in  the 
design  to  distract  consciousness,  step  by  step, 
from  its  concern  with  notions  of  right  living  (that 
is  to  say,  those  that  have  been  proved  to  be  right 
by  wide  and  carefully  considered  experience), 
so  that  instinct  attains  to  a perfect  automatism — 
a primary  necessity  to  every  sort  of  mastery,  to 
every  sort  of  perfection  in  the  art  of  life.  To 
draw  up  such  a law-book  as  Manu’s  means  to  lay 
before  a people  the  possibility  of  future  mastery, 
of  attainable  perfection — it  permits  them  to 
aspire  to  the  highest  reaches  of  the  art  of  life. 
To  that  end  the  thing  must  be  made  unconscious: 
that  is  the  aim  of  every  holy  lie. — The  order  of 
castes,  the  highest,  the  dominating  law,  is  merely 
the  ratification  of  an  order  of  nature,  of  a natural 
— 163  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


law  of  the  first  rank,  over  which  no  arbitrary  fiat, 
no  “modern  idea,”  can  exert  any  influence.  In 
every  healthy  society  there  are  three  physiologi- 
cal types,  gravitating  toward  differentiation  but 
mutually  conditioning  one  another,  and  each  of 
these  has  its  own  hygiene,  its  own  sphere  of  work, 
its  own  special  master}^  and  feeling  of  perfection. 
It  is  not  Manu  but  nature  that  sets  off  in  one  class 
hose  who  are  chiefly  intellectual,  in  another  those 
who  are  marked  by  muscular  strength  and  tem- 
perament, and  in  a third  those  who  are  distin- 
guished in  neither  one  way  or  the  other,  but  show 
only  mediocrity — the  last-named  represents  the 
great  majority,  and  the  first  two  the  select.  The 
superior  caste — I call  it  the  fewest — has,  as  the 
most  perfect,  the  privileges  of  the  few:  it  stands 
for  happiness,  for  beauty,  for  everything  good 
upon  earth.  Only  the  most  intellectual  of  men 
have  any  right  to  beauty,  to  the  beautiful;  only  in 
them  can  goodness  escape  being  weakness.  Pul- 
chrum  est  paucorum  hominum:  ^ goodness  is  a 
privilege.  Nothing  could  be  more  unbecoming 
to  them  than  uncouth  manners  or  a pessimistic 
look,  or  an  eye  that  sees  ugliness — or  indignation 
against  the  general  aspect  of  things.  Indigna- 


1 Few  men  are  noble. 


164  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


tion  is  the  privilege  of  the  Chandala ; so  is  pessi- 
mism. “The  world  is  perfect” — so  prompts  the 
instinct  of  the  intellectual,  the  instinct  of  the 
man  who  says  yes  to  life.  “Imperfection,  what- 
ever is  inferior  to  us,  distance,  the  pathos  of  dis- 
tance, even  the  Chandala  themselves  are  parts  of 
this  perfection.”  The  most  intelligent  men,  like 
the  strongest,  find  their  happiness  where  others 
would  find  only  disaster:  in  the  labyrinth,  in 
being  hard  with  themselves  and  with  others,  in 
effort;  their  delight  is  in  self-mastery;  in  them 
asceticism  becomes  second  nature,  a necessity,  an 
instinct.  They  regard  a difficult  task  as  a privi- 
lege; it  is  to  them  a recreation  to  play  with  bur- 
dens that  would  crush  all  others.  . . . Knowl- 
edge— a form  of  asceticism. — They  are  the  most 
honourable  kind  of  men:  but  that  does  not  pre- 
vent them  being  the  most  cheerful  and  most  ami- 
able. They  rule,  not  because  they  want  to,  but 
because  they  are;  they  are  not  at  liberty  to  play 
second. — The  second  caste:  to  this  belong  the 
guardians  of  the  law,  the  keepers  of  order  and 
security,  the  more  noble  warriors,  above  all,  the 
king  as  the  highest  form  of  warrior,  judge  and 
preserver  of  the  law.  The  second  in  rank  con- 
stitute the  executive  arm  of  the  intellectuals,  the 
— 165  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


next  to  them  in  rank,  taking  from  them  all  that  is 
rough  in  the  business  of  ruling — their  followers, 
their  right  hand,  their  most  apt  disciples. — In 
all  this,  I repeat,  there  is  nothing  arbitrary,  noth- 
ing “made  up”;  whatever  is  to  the  contrary  is 
made  up — by  it  nature  is  brought  to  shame.  . . . 
The  order  of  castes,  the  order  of  rank,  simply 
formulates  the  supreme  law  of  life  itself;  the 
separation  of  the  three  types  is  necessary  to  the 
maintenance  of  society,  and  to  the  evolution  of 
higher  types,  and  the  highest  types — the  inequal- 
ity of  rights  is  essential  to  the  existence  of  any 
rights  at  all. — A right  is  a privilege.  Every  one 
enjoys  the  privileges  that  accord  with  his  state  of 
existence.  Let  us  not  underestimate  the  privi- 
leges of  the  mediocre.  Life  is  always  harder  as 
one  mounts  the  heights — the  cold  increases,  re- 
sponsibility increases.  A high  civilization  is  a 
pyramid:  it  can  stand  only  on  a broad  base;  its 
primary  prerequisite  is  a strong  and  soundly 
consolidated  mediocrity.  The  handicrafts,  com- 
merce, agriculture,  science,  the  greater  part  of 
art,  in  brief,  the  whole  range  of  occupational 
activities,  are  compatible  only  with  mediocre 
ability  and  aspiration;  such  callings  would  be 
out  of  place  for  exceptional  men;  the  instincts 
— 166  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


which  belong  to  them  stand  as  much  opposed  to 
aristocracy  as  to  anarchism.  The  fact  that  a 
man  is  publicly  useful,  that  he  is  a wheel,  a func- 
tion, is  evidence  of  a natural  predisposition;  it 
is  not  society,  but  the  only  sort  of  happiness  that 
the  majority  are  capable  of,  that  makes  them  in- 
telligent machines.  To  the  mediocre  mediocrity 
is  a form  of  happiness;  they  have  a natural  in- 
stinct for  mastering  one  thing,  for  specialization. 
It  would  be  altogether  unworthy  of  a profound 
intellect  to  see  anything  objectionable  in  medioc- 
rity in  itself.  It  is,  in  fact,  the  first  prerequisite 
to  the  appearance  of  the  exceptional:  it  is  a nec- 
essary condition  to  a high  degree  of  civilization. 
When  the  exceptional  man  handles  the  mediocre 
man  with  more  delicate  fingers  than  he  applies  to 
himself  or  to  his  equals,  this  is  not  merely  kind- 
ness of  heart — it  is  simply  his  duty.  . . . Whom 
do  I hate  most  heartily  among  the  rabbles  of  to- 
day? The  rabble  of  Socialists,  the  apostles  to 
the  Chandala,  who  undermine  the  workingman’s 
instincts,  his  pleasure,  his  feeling  of  contentment 
with  his  petty  existence — who  make  him  envious 
and  teach  him  revenge.  . . . Wrong  never  lies 
in  unequal  rights;  it  lies  in  the  assertion  of 
“equal”  rights.  . . . What  is  bad?  But  I have 
— 167  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


already  answered:  all  that  proceeds  from  weak- 
ness, from  envy,  from  revenge. — The  anarchist 
and  the  Christian  have  the  same  ancestry.  . . . 

58. 

In  point  of  fact,  the  end  for  which  one  lies 
makes  a great  difference:  whether  one  preserves 
thereby  or  destroys.  There  is  a perfect  likeness 
between  Christian  and  anarchist:  their  object, 
their  instinct,  points  only  toward  destruction. 
One  need  only  turn  to  history  for  a proof  of  this: 
there  it  appears  with  appalling  distinctness.  We 
have  just  studied  a code  of  religious  legislation 
whose  object  it  was  to  convert  the  conditions 
which  cause  life  to  flourish  into  an  “eternal”  so- 
cial organization, — Christianity  found  its  mis- 
sion in  putting  an  end  to  such  an  organization, 
because  life  flourished  under  it.  There  the 
benefits  that  reason  had  produced  during  long 
ages  of  experiment  and  insecurity  were  applied 
to  the  most  remote  uses,  and  an  effort  was  made 
to  bring  in  a harvest  that  should  be  as  large,  as 
rich  and  as  complete  as  possible;  here,  on  the 
contrary,  the  harvest  is  blighted  overnight.  . . . 
That  which  stood  there  aere  perennis,  the  impe- 
rium  Romanum,  the  most  magnificent  form  of 
— 168  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

organization  under  difficult  conditions  that  has 
ever  heen  achieved,  and  compared  to  which 
everything  before  it  and  after  it  appears  as 
patchwork,  bungling,  dilletantism — those  holy 
anarchists  made  it  a matter  of  “piety”  to  destroy 
“the  world,”  which  is  to  say,  the  imperium  Ro- 
manum,  so  that  in  the  end  not  a stone  stood  upon 
another — and  even  Germans  and  other  such  louts 
were  able  to  become  its  masters.  . . . The  Chris- 
tian and  the  anarchist:  both  are  decadents;  both 
are  incapable  of  any  act  that  is  not  disintegrating, 
poisonous,  degenerating,  bloodsucking;  both 
have  an  instinct  of  mortal  hatred  of  everything 
that  stands  up,  and  is  great,  and  has  durability, 
and  promises  life  a future.  . . . Christianity 
was  the  vampire  of  the  imperium  Romanum, — 
overnight  it  destroyed  the  vast  achievement  of  the 
Romans:  the  conquest  of  the  soil  for  a great  cul- 
ture that  could  await  its  time.  Can  it  be  that  this 
fact  is  not  yet  understood?  The  imperium  Ro- 
manum that  we  know,  and  that  the  history  of  the 
Roman  provinces  teaches  us  to  know  better  and 
better, — this  most  admirable  of  all  works  of  art 
in  the  grand  manner  was  merely  the  beginning, 
and  the  structure  to  follow  was  not  to  prove  its 
worth  for  thousands  of  years.  To  this  day,  noth- 
— 169  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


ing  on  a like  scale  sub  specie  aeterni  has  been 
brought  into  being,  or  even  dreamed  of! — This 
organization  was  strong  enough  to  withstand  bad 
emperors:  the  accident  of  personality  has  noth- 
ing to  do  with  such  things — the  first  principle  of 
all  genuinely  great  architecture.  But  it  was  not 
strong  enough  to  stand  up  against  the  corruptest 
of  all  forms  of  corruption — against  Christians. 
. . . These  stealthy  worms,  which  under  the 
cover  of  night,  mist  and  duplicity,  crept  upon 
every  individual,  sucking  him  dry  of  all  earnest 
interest  in  real  things,  of  all  instinct  for  reality — 
this  cowardly,  effeminate  and  sugar-coated  gang 
gradually  alienated  all  “souls,”  step  by  step, 
from  that  colossal  edifice,  turning  lagainst  it  all 
the  meritorious,  manly  and  noble  natures  that  had 
found  in  the  cause  of  Rome  their  own  cause,  their 
own  serious  purpose,  their  own  pride.  The 
sneakishness  of  hypocrisy,  the  secrecy  of  the 
conventicle,  concepts  as  black  as  hell,  such  as  the 
sacrifice  of  the  innocent,  the  unio  mystica  in  the 
drinking  of  blood,  above  all,  the  slowly  rekin- 
dled fire  of  revenge,  of  Chandala  revenge — all 
that  sort  of  thing  became  master  of  Rome:  the 
same  kind  of  religion  which,  in  a pre-existent 
form,  Epicurus  had  combatted.  One  has  but  to 
— 170  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

read  Lucretius  to  know  what  Epicurus  made  war 
upon — not  paganism,  but  “Christianity,”  which 
is  to  say,  the  corruption  of  souls  by  means  of  the 
concepts  of  guilt,  punishment  and  immortality. — 
He  combatted  the  subterranean  cults,  the  whole 
of  latent  Christianity — to  deny  immortality  was 
already  a form  of  genuine  salvation. — Epicurus 
had  triumphed,  and  every  respectable  intellect  in 
Rome  was  Epicurean — when  Paul  appeared  . . . 
Paul,  the  Chandala  hatred  of  Rome,  of  “the 
world,”  in  the  flesh  and  inspired  by  genius — the 
Jew,  the  eternal  Jew  par  excellence.  . . . What 
he  saw  was  how,  with  the  aid  of  the  small  sec- 
tarian Christian  movement  that  stood  apart  from 
Judaism,  a “world  conflagration”  might  be  kin- 
dled; how,  with  the  symbol  of  “God  on  the 
cross,”  all  secret  seditions,  all  the  fruits  of  anar- 
chistic intrigues  in  the  empire,  might  be  amalga- 
mated into  one  immense  power.  “Salvation  is 
of  the  Jews.” — Christianity  is  the  formula  for 
exceeding  and  summing  up  the  subterranean 
cults  of  all  varieties,  that  of  Osiris,  that  of  the 
Great  Mother,  that  of  Mithras,  for  instance:  in 
his  discernment  of  this  fact  the  genius  of  Paul 
showed  itself.  His  instinct  was  here  so  sure 
that,  with  reckless  violence  to  the  truth,  he  put 
— 171  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


the  ideas  which  lent  fascination  to  every  sort  of 
Chandala  religion  into  the  mouth  of  the  “Sav- 
iour” as  his  own  inventions,  and  not  only  into 
the  mouth — he  made  out  of  him  something  that 
even  a priest  of  Mithras  could  understand.  . . . 
This  was  his  revelation  at  Damascus : he  grasped 
the  fact  that  he  needed  the  belief  in  immortality 
in  order  to  rob  “the  world”  of  its  value,  that  the 
concept  of  “hell”  would  master  Rome — that  the 
notion  of  a “beyond”  is  the  death  of  life.  . . . 
Nihilist  and  Christian:  they  rhyme  in  German, 
and  they  do  more  than  rhyme.  . . . 

59. 

The  whole  labour  of  the  ancient  world  gone 
for  naught:  I have  no  word  to  describe  the  feel- 
ings that  such  an  enormity  arouses  in  me. — And, 
considering  the  fact  that  its  labour  was  merely 
preparatory,  that  with  adamantine  self-conscious- 
ness it  laid  only  the  foundations  for  a work  to 
go  on  for  thousands  of  years,  the  whole  meaning 
of  antiquity  disappears!  ...  To  what  end  the 
Greeks?  to  what  end  the  Romans? — All  the  pre- 
requisites to  a learned  culture,  all  the  methods  of 
science,  were  already  there;  man  had  already 
perfected  the  great  and  incomparable  art  of  read- 
— 172  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

ing  profitably — that  first  necessity  to  the  tradi- 
tion of  culture,  the  unity  of  the  sciences;  the 
natural  sciences,  in  alliance  with  mathematics 
and  mechanics,  were  on  the  right  road, — the 
sense  of  fact,  the  last  and  more  valuable  of  all 
the  senses,  had  its  schools,  and  its  traditions  were 
already  centuries  old!  Is  all  this  properly  un- 
derstood? Every  essential  to  the  beginning  of 
the  work  was  ready: — and  the  most  essential,  it 
cannot  be  said  too  often,  are  methods,  and  also 
the  most  difficult  to  develop,  and  the  longest  op- 
posed by  habit  and  laziness.  What  we  have  to- 
day reconquered,  with  unspeakable  self-disci- 
pline, for  ourselves — for  certain  bad  instincts, 
certain  Christian  instincts,  still  lurk  in  our  bodies 
— that  is  to  say,  the  keen  eye  for  reality,  the 
cautious  hand,  patience  and  seriousness  in  the 
smallest  things,  the  whole  integrity  of  knowledge 
— all  these  things  were  already  there,  and  had 
been  there  for  two  thousand  years!  More,  there 
was  also  a refined  and  excellent  tact  and  taste! 
Not  as  mere  brain-drilling!  Not  as  “German” 
culture,  with  its  loutish  manners!  But  as  body, 
as  bearing,  as  instinct — in  short,  as  reality.  . . . 
All  gone  for  naught!  Overnight  it  became 
merely  a memory ! — The  Greeks ! The  Romans ! 
— 173  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


Instinctive  nobility,  taste,  methodical  inquiry, 
genius  for  organization  and  administration,  faith 
in  and  the  will  to  secure  the  future  of  man,  a 
great  yes  to  everything  entering  into  the  Impe- 
rium Romanum  and  palpable  to  all  the  senses,  a 
grand  style  that  was  beyond  mere  art,  but  had 
become  reality,  truth,  life.  . . . — All  over- 
whelmed in  a night,  but  not  by  a convulsion  of 
nature!  Not  trampled  to  death  by  Teutons  and 
others  of  heavy  hoof!  But  brought  to  shame  by 
crafty,  sneaking,  invisible,  anaemic  vampires! 
Not  conquered, — only  sucked  dry  I . . . Hidden 
vengefulness,  petty  envy,  became  master! 
Everything  wretched,  intrinsically  ailing,  and 
invaded  by  bad  feelings,  the  whole  ghetto-world 
of  the  soul,  was  at  once  on  top! — One  needs  but 
read  any  of  the  Christian  agitators,  for  example, 
St.  Augustine,  in  order  to  realize,  in  order  to 
smell,  what  filthy  fellows  came  to  the  top.  It 
would  be  an  error,  however,  to  assume  that  there 
was  any  lack  of  understanding  in  the  leaders  of 
the  Christian  movement: — ah,  but  they  were 
clever,  clever  to  the  point  of  holiness,  these  fa- 
thers of  the  church!  What  they  lacked  was 
something  quite  different.  Nature  neglected — 
perhaps  forgot — to  give  them  even  the  most 
— 174  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


modest  endowment  of  respectable,  of  upright,  of 
cleanly  instincts.  . . . Between  ourselves,  they 
are  not  even  men.  ...  If  Islam  despises  Qiris- 
tianity,  it  has  a thousandfold  right  to  do  so: 
Islam  at  least  assumes  that  it  is  dealing  with 
men.  . . . 


60. 

Christianity  destroyed  for  us  the  whole  har- 
vest of  ancient  civilization,  and  later  it  also  de- 
stroyed for  us  the  whole  harvest  of  Mohammedan 
civilization.  The  wonderful  culture  of  the 
Moors  in  Spain,  which  was  fundamentally  nearer 
to  us  and  appealed  more  to  our  senses  and  tastes 
than  that  of  Rome  and  Greece,  was  trampled 
down  ( — I do  not  say  by  what  sort  of  feet — ) 
Why?  Because  it  had  to  thank  noble  and  manly 
instincts  for  its  origin — because  it  said  yes  to 
life,  even  to  the  rare  and  refined  luxuriousness  of 
Moorish  life!  . . . The  crusaders  later  made 
war  on  something  before  which  it  would  have 
been  more  fitting  for  them  to  have  grovelled  in 
the  dust — a civilization  beside  which  even  that 
of  our  nineteenth  century  seems  very  poor  and 
very  “senile.” — ^What  they  wanted,  of  course, 
was  booty:  the  orient  was  rich.  . . . Let  us  put 
— 175  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

aside  our  prejudices!  The  crusades  were  a 
higher  form  of  piracy,  nothing  more!  The  Ger- 
man nobility,  which  is  fundamentally  a Viking 
nobility,  was  in  its  element  there:  the  church 
knew  only  too  well  how  the  German  nobility  was 
to  be  won.  . . . The  German  noble,  always  the 
“Swiss  guard”  of  the  church,  always  in  the  serv- 
ice of  every  bad  instinct  of  the  church — but  well 
paid.  . . . Consider  the  fact  that  it  is  precisely 
the  aid  of  German  swords  and  German  blood 
and  valour  that  has  enabled  the  church  to  carry 
through  its  war  to  the  death  upon  everything 
noble  on  earth!  At  this  point  a host  of  painful 
questions  suggest  themselves.  The  German  no- 
bility stands  outside  the  history  of  the  higher 
civilization:  the  reason  is  obvious.  . . . Chris- 
tianity, alcohol — the  two  great  means  of  corrup- 
tion. . . . Intrinsically  there  should  be  no  more 
choice  between  Islam  and  Christianity  than  there 
is  between  an  Arab  and  a Jew.  The  decision  is 
already  reached;  nobody  remains  at  liberty  to 
choose  here.  Either  a man  is  a Chandala  or  he 
is  not.  . . . “War  to  the  knife  with  Rome! 
Peace  and  friendship  with  Islam!”:  this  was  the 
feeling,  this  was  the  act,  of  that  great  free  spirit, 
that  genius  among  German  emperors,  Frederick 
— 176  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


II.  What!  must  a German  first  be  a genius,  a 
free  spirit,  before  he  can  feel  decently?  I can’t 
make  out  how  a German  could  ever  feel  Chris- 

tlQiTht  • • • 

61. 

Here  it  becomes  necessary  to  call  up  a memory 
that  must  be  a hundred  times  more  painful  to 
Germans.  The  Germans  have  destroyed  for  Eu- 
rope the  last  great  harvest  of  civilization  that 
Europe  was  ever  to  reap — the  Renaissance.  Is 
it  understood  at  last,  will  it  ever  be  understood, 
what  the  Renaissance  was?  The  transvaluation 
of  Christian  values, — an  attempt  with  all  avail- 
able means,  all  instincts  and  all  the  resources  of 
genius  to  bring  about  a triumph  of  the  opposite 
values,  the  more  noble  values.  . . . This  has 
been  the  one  great  war  of  the  past;  there  has 
never  been  a more  critical  question  than  that  of 
the  Renaissance — it  is  my  question  too — ; there 
has  never  been  a form  of  attack  more  fundamen- 
tal, more  direct,  or  more  violently  delivered  by  a 
whole  front  upon  the  center  of  the  enemy!  To 
attack  at  the  critical  place,  at  the  very  seat  of 
Christianity,  and  there  enthrone  the  more  noble 
values — ^that  is  to  say,  to  insinuate  them  into  the 
— 177  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


instincts,  into  the  most  fundamental  needs  and 
appetites  of  those  sitting  there  ...  I see  before 
me  the  possibility  of  a perfectly  heavenly  en- 
chantment and  spectacle : — it  seems  to  me  to  scin- 
tillate with  all  the  vibrations  of  a fine  and  deli- 
cate beauty,  and  within  it  there  is  an  art  so  divine, 
so  infernally  divine,  that  one  might  search  in 
vain  for  thousands  of  years  for  another  such  pos- 
sibility; I see  a spectacle  so  rich  in  significance 
and  at  the  same  time  so  wonderfully  full  of 
paradox  that  it  should  arouse  all  the  gods  on 
Olympus  to  immortal  laughter — Ccesar  Borgia  as 
pope!  . . . Am  I understood?  . . . Well  then, 
that  would  have  been  the  sort  of  triumph  that  I 
alone  am  longing  for  today — : by  it  Chrstianity 
would  have  been  swept  away! — ^What  happened? 
A German  monk,  Luther,  came  to  Rome.  This 
monk,  with  all  the  vengeful  instincts  of  an  unsuc- 
cessful priest  in  him,  raised  a rebellion  against 
the  Renaissance  in  Rome.  . . . Instead  of  grasp- 
ing, with  profound  thanksgiving,  the  miracle  that 
had  taken  place:  the  conquest  of  Christianity  at 
its  capital — instead  of  this,  his  hatred  was  stimu- 
lated by  the  spectacle.  A religious  man  thinks 
only  of  himself. — Luther  saw  only  the  depravity 
of  the  papacy  at  the  very  moment  when  the  oppo- 
— 178  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


site  was  becoming  apparent:  the  old  corruption, 
the  peccatum  originale,  Christianity  itself,  no 
longer  occupied  the  papal  chair!  Instead  there 
was  life  1 Instead  there  was  the  triumph  of  life  1 
Instead  there  was  a great  yea  to  all  lofty,  beau- 
tiful and  daring  things!  . . . And  Luther  re- 
stored the  church:  he  attacked  it.  . . . The  Re- 
naissance— an  event  without  meaning,  a great 
futility ! — Ah,  these  Germans,  what  they  have  not 
cost  us!  Futility — that  has  always  been  the 
work  of  the  Germans. — The  Reformation;  Lieh- 
nitz;  Kant  and  so-called  German  philosophy;  the 
war  of  “liheration”;  the  empire — every  time  a 
futile  substitute  for  something  that  once  existed, 
for  something  irrecoverable.  . . . These  Ger- 
mans, I confess,  are  my  enemies:  I despise  all 
their  uncleanliness  in  concept  and  valuation, 
their  cowardice  before  every  honest  yea  and  nay. 
For  nearly  a thousand  years  they  have  tangled 
and  confused  everything  their  fingers  have 
touched;  they  have  on  their  conscience  all  the 
half-way  measures,  all  the  three-eighths-way 
measures,  that  Europe  is  sick  of, — they  also  have 
on  their  conscience  the  uncleanest  variety  of 
Christianity  that  exists,  and  the  most  incurable 
and  indestructible — Protestantism.  ...  If  man- 
— 179  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 

kind  never  manages  to  get  rid  of  Christianity  the 
Germans  will  be  to  blame.  . . . 

62. 

— With  this  I come  to  a conclusion  and  pro- 
nounce my  judgment.  I condemn  Christianity; 
I bring  against  the  Christian  church  the  most 
terrible  of  all  the  accusations  that  an  accuser 
has  ever  had  in  his  mouth.  It  is,  to  me,  the 
greatest  of  all  imaginable  corruptions;  it  seeks 
to  work  the  ultimate  corruption,  the  worst  possi- 
ble corruption.  The  Christian  church  has  left 
nothing  untouched  by  its  depravity ; it  has  turned 
every  value  into  worthlessness,  and  every  truth 
into  a lie,  and  every  integrity  into  baseness  of 
soul,  f Let  any  one  dare  to  speak  to  me  of  its 
“humanitarian”  blessings!  Its  deepest  necessi- 
ties range  it  against  any  effort  to  abolish  distress ; 
it  lives  by  distress;  it  creates  distress  to  make 
itself  immortal.  ...  For  example,  the  worm  of 
sin : it  was  the  church  that  first  enriched  mankind 
with  this  misery! — The  “equality  of  souls  before 
God” — this  fraud,  this  pretext  for  the  rancunes 
of  all  the  base-minded — this  explosive  concept, 
ending  in  revolution,  the  modem  idea,  and  the 
notion  of  overthrowing  the  whole  social  order — 
— 180  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


this  is  Christian  dynamite.  . . . The  “humani- 
tarian” blessings  of  Christianity  forsooth!  To 
breed  out  of  humanitas  a self-contradiction,  an 
art  of  self-pollution,  a will  to  lie  at  any  price, 
an  aversion  and  contempt  for  all  good  and  honest 
instincts!  All  this,  to  me,  is  the  “humanitarian- 
ism”  of  Christianity! — Parasitism  as  the  only 
practice  of  the  church;  with  its  anaemic  and 
“holy”  ideals,  sucking  all  the  blood,  all  the  love, 
all  the  hope  out  of  life;  the  beyond  as  the  will 
to  deny  all  reality ; the  cross  as  the  distinguishing 
mark  of  the  most  subterranean  conspiracy  ever 
heard  of, — against  health,  beauty,  well-being, 
intellect,  kindness  of  soul — against  life  it- 
self. . . . 

This  eternal  accusation  against  Christianity  I 
shall  write  upon  all  walls,  wherever  walls  are  to 
be  found — I have  letters  that  even  the  blind  will 
be  able  to  see.  ...  I call  Christianity  the  one 
great  curse,  the  one  great  intrinsic  depravity,  the 
one  great  instinct  of  revenge,  for  which  no  means 
are  venomous  enough,  or  secret,  subterranean 
and  small  enough, — I call  it  the  one  immortal 
blemish  upon  the  human  race.  . . . 

And  mankind  reckons  time  from  the  dies  ne- 
fastus  when  this  fatality  befell — from  the  first 
— 181  — 


THE  ANTICHRIST 


day  of  Christianity! — Why  not  rather  from  its 
last? — From  today? — The  transvaluation  of  all 
values!  . . . 


THE  END 


— 182  — 


A 

NOTE 
ON  THE 
TYPE  IN 
WHICH  THIS 
BOOK  IS  SET 


This  book  is  com- 
posed on  the  Lino- 
type in  Bodoni,  so- 
called  after  its  designer, 
Giambattista  Bodoni 
{1740-1813)  a celebrated 
Italian  scholar  and  printer.  Bo- 
doni planned  his  type  especially 
for  use  on  the  more  smoothly  finished 
papers  that  came  into  vogue  late  in  the 
eighteenth  century  and  drew  his  letters 
with  a mechanical  regularity  that  is  readily 
apparent  on  comparison  with  the  less  formal 
old  style.  Other  characteristics  that  will  be  noted 
are  the  square  serifs  without  fillet  and  the  marked 
contrast  between  the  light  and  heavy  strokes, 

SET  UP,  ELECTROTYPE0  AND  PRINTED 
BY  VAIL-BALLOU  PRESS,  INC.,  BING- 
HAMTON, N.  Y.  ‘BOUND  BY  H. 
WOLFF  ESTATE,  NEW  YORK  • PA- 
PER MADE  BY  S.  D.  WARREN  CO., 
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 


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